Agile2024 Accelerating Products Friday Recap

#Agile2024 is over, so this is the last of my recaps from the conference.

In my previous recaps, I shared brief descriptions of the talks going on at Agile2024 on the Accelerating Products track. In many cases there were multiple sessions going on at the same time, so I got some help with the takeaways from the sessions I couldn’t make it to.

Although it wasn’t originally planned, we even had parallel sessions on Friday morning. So I’ve included notes from both those sessions and acknowledgement of key people for the conference and the Accelerating Products Track.

In case you missed the previous recaps, here they are:

Monday Recap

Tuesday Recap

Thursday Recap

Building customer centric products and services - a proven way to evoke it in teams and in orgs

Customer centricity is being used more and more in organizations.

There is nothing so sad as having a great product or service that no one wants or needs.

William Strydom shared a technique he’s successfully used to bring this important concept alive in the teams and organizations. William talked about the why and the what of empathy mapping and how it supports customer centricity.

A Note about this session

William was originally scheduled to present this session on Tuesday afternoon, then this happened and he didn’t get to the conference site until… Tuesday afternoon.

Fortunately, he did make it and got rescheduled to Friday morning parallel to the wrapped session (see below). If you’d like to know more about Empathy Mapping, I encourage you to reach out to William.

Accelerating Products Wrapped

At this year’s conference each track team got the opportunity to put a bow on the conference for their track via a wrapped session on Friday morning. We decided the best way to approach that was to have a panel discussion.

So I moderated a discussion between Holly B. Holly Hester-Reilly , Faith Peterson , and Jeff Patton .

Here are some of the highlights from our discussion.

What are some general observations from the conference?

There is some helpful cross pollination going on between product management and agile.

Some organizations realize product management is a thing, yet there is an equal, if not larger number that don’t realize product management is a thing.

What can the agile community and product management community learn from each other?

The product management community can learn how to inspect and adapt and get a better appreciation of engineering practices from the agile community.

Folks in the agile community can learn how to push back to requests to blindly build a particular solution from product management.

The product management community has done a much better job of figuring out how to define business value that agile folks can learn from.

Product managers can learn how to collaborate from agile folks.

Organizations need to learn much more about both agile and product management.

Many organizations don’t understand they have software products. Common misconception: “If I write it, it’s not a product. If I buy it, it’s a product”

When organizations scale they get engrossed in metrics and how they’re doing it and loose sight of the people. “Personas don’t interact with your product. People do.”

Product understanding is unevenly distributed. What are some examples of organizations effectively spreading knowledge around?

Petra Wille collected stories about communities of practice which is an approach some organizations have used to spread product management knowledge.

In many communities of practice, product managers get together to share their experience and hold external workshops internal to the company.

However, communities of practice are too few and far between.

As a counterpoint, if teams are successful, how big of an issue is unevenly distributed knowledge?

What are some ways to educate first time managers about product management?

Hold workshops with new leaders where they can experience about how product management happens.

Focus on “hats instead of heads” (roles instead of jobs)

Managers need to learn what to do with product managers, and learn the difference between IT service organizations and product organizations.

Also need to understand the impact legacy code that was built and shouldn’t have on team’s ability to deliver. Legacy code is why things are slow.

If we build something and people don’t use it, that doesn’t help the business.

First time managers need to know how the stuff you build leads to outcomes.

What’s one of the first things you should do when introducing change?

Measure/observe what happens after you ship.

Take makers and leaders to where people use your product.

Make people talk about what they’ve learned and make it part of your routine.

Techniques for Prioritization

Get clarity between who’s asking for what.

Watch out for confusion between dealing with requests and strategic intent.

Prioritize outcomes, not features or things.

Make things smaller, and then finish them.

Sometimes prioritization is dumb. When there’s a set of things that all should be done, you’re better off budgeting time (New features, cleaning up tech debt, and fixing bugs)

Limit the things that you prioritize.

How do organizations know they’re ready for moving from Project → Product?

They know the concepts behind the product operating model.

They have a basic understanding of what a product is.

They shouldn’t do it if they haven’t figured out how to deliver in small increments.

Leaders in the organization know why they want to make the move and what they hope to get out of it.

Are we having the same discussions at the conference that we were having 10 years ago?

Yes.

In some cases, we’re having the same discussion because there are some orgs that are just starting to adopt agile, so it makes sense to have the same type of discussions with them. What is frustrating is having the same discussions with people who have been in the community for a while.

Acknowledgements

I wanted to finish this series of recaps with an acknowledgement of a couple of key groups.

Conference and Program Chairs

I’d like to thank Conference Chair Dana Pylayeva, PCC, CEC and Program Chairs Semira Allen , Chris Murman , Reese Schmit for giving me the opportunity to be involved with the conference again.

I also would like to tell you all great job. I really enjoyed my first Agile20XX conference in six years, and your efforts to put together a great event contributed to that.

Accelerating Products Track Team

It was a blast working with my Accelerating Products Track Co-Chair, Holly Bielawa.

And a big thank you to the Accelerating Products Track Team: Lead Reviewers Holly Hester-Reilly, and Faith Peterson and reviewers Laura Blersch, MBA, CSM , Sara Brooks , Tina Burnett , Jon Harcey , Nate Jones , Magz Karaya 🌛 , Connie Kwan , Chris Pipito , and Alexandra Pressland .

Your efforts leading up to the conference ensured a successful Accelerating Products track at the conference.