Dave West

Product definition is a complex, political and challenging task in large IT organizations. In this blog we discuss what organizations need to consider when looking at their product model. We discuss why shared services could be candidates to become products and the value of tying product to strategy and value. We provide some simple questions to ask of your products to help guide the selection and remind the reader that product models like organizational structures require people and people come with politics.

The Agile Product Operating Model (APOM) is a natural progression for your agile transformation. It provides an ‘in-between’ stage between the whole enterprise change and delivery team change with the idea of products. By aligning to products, you can incrementally change the organization, allowing each product group to adopt a different operating model. Of course, that comes with some challenges, including how products are funded, comfort in parts of the organization operating differently, and where authority and decision-making reside.

Project to Product states that product-based approaches will replace project-based approaches for delivering digital work. The book Project to Product by Mik Kersten describes this approach, comparing how BMW manages production to how a bank delivers digital products—highlighting the complexity, bureaucracy, and lack of transparency in project-based approaches. The Agile Product Operating Model (APOM) is a framework that helps organizations adopt a product-based approach. It helps organizations change mindset, alignment, and funding to support a product approach. APOM, an empirical approach, has seven characteristics: self-managed teams, learning-oriented, aligned incentives, empowered product leadership, integrated strategy, product investment, and agile governance.

In this blog, we dispel a series of myths associated with product discovery in Scrum. Myths such as “it's a phase in the process and can not be done in a Sprint,” “It's only for greenfield projects,” to “ The DoD stops us from doing Discovery”.

Discovery and validation should be an integral part of the work of a Scrum Team. It provides a collection of practices that enable Scrum Teams to drive an evidence-based approach to value.

Digital technology allows organizations to be more customer-centric by delivering more value to customers via faster time to market, improved data insights, and more innovative products. However, aligning with customers is only part of the story. Not only do you need to focus on customers, but you also need to consider their needs in the context of value, cost, governance, and culture. Customer opportunity is a crucial ingredient but in the context of something much more significant and complex. Product has become the container for this. Product thinking must take center stage to enable organizations to align better with outcomes and value. In this blog, we discuss why everyone is talking more and more about Product Thinking and how knowledge workers need to think about value in the digital age.

As more and more companies wrestle with the digital age, they are increasingly looking to approach initiatives differently. They are moving from a project to a product mindset. In this blog, I describe why product thinking is increasingly important to project managers.

The Product Backlog is an essential artifact in Scrum, but backlogs could be better for many teams. In this blog, we discuss introducing a new class, Professional Scrum Product Backlog Management - Skills, and how it provides learners with the skills necessary to improve their Product Backlogs.

The Product Backlog is crucial for Scrum to be effective. But for many teams, Product Backlogs are bloated, confusing, and hard to navigate. This blog discusses the challenges of building a great Product Backlog and what Scrum Teams can do to fight the bloat.

Agile is over 20 years old, and the Agile conference has been running since 2005. But are we seeing any changes? Has agile adoption stalled? This blog discusses enterprise adoption challenges and the environment necessary for Agile to succeed.