In my journey through the world of software development, I’ve often encountered a significant gap in how organisations approach product management. This gap becomes glaringly obvious when companies attempt to transition from traditional project management methods—think Gantt charts and rigid milestones—to a more agile mindset. The reality is that building software products is inherently complex and dynamic, and the old ways simply don’t cut it anymore.
The Challenge of Transitioning to Agile
When organisations decide to embrace agile methodologies, they often strip away the familiar structures of project management without replacing them with anything substantial. This is where things start to unravel. Without a clear vision, value, and validation, teams can quickly find themselves off track, wondering why their efforts aren’t yielding the expected results.
- Vision: A shared understanding of what we’re trying to achieve.
- Value: The importance of delivering something meaningful to our customers.
- Validation: The need to measure our success and ensure we’re moving in the right direction.
These elements are crucial for fostering collaboration and ensuring that everyone is aligned towards a common goal.
The Importance of a Common Goal
In my experience, one of the most significant oversights in many organisations is the failure to communicate a common goal effectively. It’s not enough to simply announce a directive; we need to engage everyone involved in the process. People don’t just follow goals; they follow their own. Therefore, it’s essential to create an environment where all team members—from software developers to legal and cybersecurity personnel—understand and are invested in the shared objective of delivering value to our customers.
Engaging the Entire Organisation
To truly engage everyone in the organisation, we must ensure that our goals are not only communicated but also understood and embraced by all. This means involving stakeholders and customers in the conversation, allowing them to contribute to the narrative of what we’re trying to achieve.
- Involve Stakeholders: Regularly engage with those who have a stake in the product.
- Communicate Effectively: Use clear and consistent messaging to ensure everyone is on the same page.
- Foster Collaboration: Encourage cross-departmental teamwork to align efforts towards the common goal.
The Product Management Mentor Programme is designed to bridge this gap by providing tools, techniques, and principles that help organisations move in the same direction. Here are some key areas we focus on:
- Evidence-Based Management: This approach allows us to assess whether we’re making progress and if we’re looking at the right metrics. It’s about understanding the data that informs our decisions.
- Hypothesis-Driven Engineering: Before adding a new feature, we should ask ourselves: What impact do we expect this feature to have? How will we measure its success? This practice encourages us to think critically about our development choices.
Maximising Value Delivery
Ultimately, the goal is to maximise the value we deliver to the business while ensuring a solid return on investment. By embedding these practices into our product development processes, we can create a more cohesive and effective approach to building software products.
In conclusion, transitioning to an agile mindset requires more than just removing old project management tools. It demands a fundamental shift in how we communicate, collaborate, and measure success. By focusing on vision, value, and validation, we can ensure that everyone in the organisation is aligned and working towards a common goal, ultimately leading to better software products and happier customers.
The product management mentor programme for software development is really a programme to allow companies that are building software products to build better software products. There’s a huge gap in the way organisations approach software development and software engineering and building those types of products where when we start transitioning, they realise that the work is so different and so complex and different all the time that the kind of more common ways of managing projects like you might for building houses or building bridges is just not going to work.
Um, because everything’s so much more complex. So they try and shift from those old ways of working where you have Gantt charts and plans and milestones and deadlines and they try and move towards agile, right? Whatever people are calling it locally, they move towards that story and they don’t, they take away those milestones and Gantt charts and traditional project management tools, right, that are supporting that story. They take those away and then they don’t replace it with anything and they wonder why it doesn’t work out, right? Things start to go wrong fairly quickly. Things go off track. We’re not going in the right direction and it’s because they’re missing a piece of that puzzle and it’s a pretty big piece of that puzzle and it’s vision, value, and validation. That’s what’s missing.
They don’t have what, um, if you go look up in the dictionary, it’s a group of people working together towards a common goal. So if you want people to work together towards a common goal, whether they’re an individual team or they’re your whole company, you need to have that common goal that they can all get behind and they can all follow, that they all understand, that it’s been communicated effectively.
And what I see in a lot of organisations is they’ll maybe communicate at once, they’ll maybe set directives and they don’t involve the people that are part of the story, the people that they want to follow that goal. And the reality is that people don’t follow your goals, they follow their goals. So in order for you to engage with all of the people in the organisation, the people in the software teams building the software, the people in the legal department, in cyber security, and all of those different parts and have us all working together towards that common goal of building and delivering this product to customers that’s going to maximise the value means that we all have to be going in the same direction.
We all have to understand the same thing, right? What is it we’re trying to achieve? And that is one of the main focuses of the product management mentor programme. We’re talking about tools and techniques, we’re talking about theories and principles and practices that help us understand why those things are needed and how we get everybody moving in the same direction. How do we, as product managers, enable not just to communicate that direction with the people within our organisation or outside of our organisation as well to involve those stakeholders and those customers in the story?
But also do we, how do we measure whether we’ve been successful, right? How do we bring in things like evidence-based management, right? Looking at our whole product and are we moving in the right direction? Are we looking at the right numbers? Do we have the right measures to be able to figure out where we’re going? Looking at things like hypothesis-driven engineering practices, right? Why are you adding this feature? What would you like the world to look like after this feature has been delivered? What would you expect the difference to be? How are we going to measure that?
Building that whole story into the way we build products so that we can maximise the value that we deliver to the business for the return for the money that they’ve put in.
