It is crazy how it works: Agile has long been misinterpreted as ignoring the long term. Nowadays, however, it is often thrown aside for short-term gains. But the world will continue to need Agility.
We may or may not continue to use Scrum, LeSS, XP, Kanban and SAFe. That being said, these are all approaches to uncovering better ways of working. They are means to an end. They are not the goal in itself.
In today’s article, I will share my insights on the state of Agility and why I believe it will grow in relevance.
Agile vs Product-Led approach
The fact that Agile was a hype doesn’t help. That doesn’t take away the fact that Agile has many answers to modern problems. The latest hype is the product-led approach, elevating the role of the Product Manager.
I wholeheartedly support that more and more people have started realizing how important it is to focus on creating products our customers love. For me, the product-led approach is a natural progression of Agile. Moving away from development only, embracing all other aspects of the product experience.
People working in customer support need to collaborate with those who build the product. After all, they all work towards optimizing the product experience. The same is true for people from marketing or operations (and many others working on pieces of the entire puzzle).
They all also need to realize that optimizing the value of the product is a discovery. The factors that blur your vision of the future are numerous: the competition (what will they do? Who will be a new competitor a year from now?), technical advancements (like AI), world events (like pandemics, boycotts or wars). All these factors make it so that creating the planned output will not automatically generate the desired outcomes. Hence, you need to shift to focusing on outcomes instead.
But what strikes me about the current hype around product-led approaches are three major things.
Firstly, this product-led approach is similar to Agile. The learning loop, the collaboration, making decisions within the cross-functional teams, focusing on outcomes: it is all very much the same. What’s more: many agilists have been adopting a product-centric way of working for years. Heck, Scrum even has the product front, left and centre.
Secondly, the product-led approach is a hype and is widely misunderstood. Just like Agile has been misunderstood. The clearest argument for this is the failure to see the similarities between Agile and a product-led approach. Consequently firing Agile Coaches and Scrum Master. Even when these people had advocated a product-led approach for years, calling it Agile.
I have witnessed adoptions of the product-led approach where the word of one person, the Product Manager, was always leading, regardless of the facts telling a different tale.
With the product-led approaches, organizations are falling into the same pitfalls as they did when they adopted Agile.
Agile vs long-term thinking
Organizations are ruled by their stock prices. Everything is ok when a company can meet the (financial) expectations of the stock market. Companies have the opportunity to grow organically. They can set out on a journey that will take years to finish.
For example, they can work towards moving away from a delivery culture to a learning culture. I believe this is a good example because Agile organizations need to embrace that learning culture striving to achieve desired outcomes and move away from the idea that output automatically leads to the desired outcome. This takes years because a culture can’t be forced upon people, it needs to grow.
But stock prices overrule everything. As soon as the organizations don’t meet the market expectations, stock prices may crumble. All of a sudden, companies need to show improvements the next year. But the problem is, sustainable change takes time. The impact will not be apparent immediately. So organizations look for drastic measures instead. The easiest cuts are with things that don’t bring immediate gains, like Agile.
So there you have it: Agile is about bringing sustainable change to the company. It may bring quick improvements on the team level, but the substantial benefits take time. And that is a problem in a world that judges companies at least every 6 months. As long as the incentive favours short-term thinking, Agile will not lead to significant benefits.
You may be thinking “Hold on. For the past 10+ years, Agile was all the hype. Everyone came with Agile as the solution to their problems and the socket market was also easily convinced.” You are right about that. But this was the time of the quick gains. When we moved away from silos to cross-functional and self-organizing teams and started working in short cycles focused on building the next piece of product together. We proved that empowering people to work closely together on one thing was superior to the Waterfall projects. But also then, teams would hit a plateau of what they could improve without any change in the rest of the organization.
The irony is that many organisations weren’t able to fully benefit from Agile because it was “too” focused on long-term and sustainable change. While most organizations are incentivized to focus on the short term.
I’m sure that the new hype of a product-centric way of working will bring short-term gains too. The two main benefits will probably be:
The people who will collaborate will no longer be limited to tech.
The focus will shift to outcomes over output.
Note that these are both Agile cornerstones, but are often not recognized as such. That said, I’m happy with any move in the right direction, regardless of the name. But I predict that the product-led approaches will also hit the wall as soon as sustainable change comes into view.
Agility remains crucial
Agile may lose popularity in favour of other approaches. But Agility continues to be crucial. The world will only become more unpredictable. Technology will advance faster and faster. We will not be able to trust long-term output-focused plans.
We will continue to need cross-functional teams, collaborating towards coming outcome-oriented goals. And we will have to focus on bringing sustainable change to the organizations. Because otherwise, they will not survive for long.
With every new popular approach I wonder: If everything we had until now was misunderstood and implemented half-heartedly, what are the chances that this one will be done right?