I was lucky to work with Andy Brandt on a recent whitepaper titled ‘ Moving Beyond Agile Transformations: Leveraging the Agile Product Operating Model (APOM).’ This paper discusses how APOM is essential in taking your agile transformation to the next level. It also explains how APOM can leverage organizations' existing investments in agility to deliver more value to their customers and finally cross the chasm of ultimate value for agility.
When Andy first discussed the paper with me, something struck me. The move to product for many organizations is a great way to leverage existing investments in agility. It seems obvious when looking at APOM now. Agile continues to be used in the project delivery phase for many organizations. Don’t get me wrong. Scrum is an excellent approach for doing work, but you only get the significant benefits of agility by removing the obstacles of project thinking. This has profound implications for any organization. Here are my top three observations of the challenges:
- Organizations must determine their products and how much to invest in them. This is a significant challenge for most organizations, requiring decisions on short-term and long-term investments. It requires tough choices about where to invest and where not to. I am sure many of you are saying, ‘Isn’t that what leadership has been doing?’ And to some true extent, however, two things tend to be missing from existing planning approaches. Firstly, the stark reality that when you build something, it has to be maintained. Secondly, the existing organization and power structures might not meet the environment's needs, but changing them is hard. For example, we all know that product X is much more valuable today, but product Y will likely replace that value in the future. So, we must move people from X to Y and reduce the investment in X. However, the leader of X is influential because of the product's current value. This complex situation is made very transparent when undertaking product planning.
- Each product may have a different operating model. Agile has always encouraged the process to be owned by the people using it. However, APOM amplifies that approach by including the whole organization in building and maintaining the product, not just for the process but for all the elements of the operating model. Of course, any organization will apply constraints such as consistent funding and governance processes, tools, or templates. Still, the operating model should be owned by the people who operate it. This approach will require organizations to push down ownership of the operating model to the teams, which will change the power dynamics of the organization. I was always shocked when I asked, “Why are you using Scrum?” and how often I was told, “Because I was told to.” Scrum and all agile processes must be owned by the teams using them. That ownership leads to improvement. APOM takes that idea and scales it, challenging many of the organization's established ideas.
- Product Authority is distributed. Once the business strategy is set, each product's product strategy will be defined. Once those strategies are defined, how they are realized is owned by the product teams, particularly the Product Owner. In the realm of digital products, change is inevitable based on experience. This experience needs to be acted on promptly, which leads to the need for empowered Product Owners. I often get into debates about the title of these people and if it can be one person. Of course, there are many nuances around title, authority, and position. If you want faster decision-making, it needs to be closer to delivery (where things are learned) and involve fewer people (ideally one). Guard rails such as goal and small increments can reduce risk. It does not matter what the title is as long as they have the authority to make decisions.
Of course, Andy describes portfolio management, the role of quality, and much more in this paper, but even if this paper highlights many things, we have to think about them differently. I am excited about the implications of APOM in unlocking the potential of agility.