Chapter 8: Product Development
The Faux Agile Problem
“The Agile brand has more or less won the methodology wars. However, much of what has been implemented is faux Agile — people following some of the common practices while failing to address wider organizational culture and processes.”
Common anti-patterns in large companies:
- Months spent on budgeting, analysis, and requirements-gathering before work starts
- Work batched into big projects with infrequent releases
- Customer feedback treated as an afterthought
True Lean product development and the Lean Startup movement emphasize testing your product’s design and business model by performing user research frequently, from the very beginning of the product lifecycle.
Lean Product Development Practices
Four capabilities that make up the Lean product development model:
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Small batches — slice products/features into chunks completable in less than a week and released frequently. Use MVPs (minimum viable products) for product-level work.
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Flow visibility — teams understand and can see the flow of work from the business all the way through to customers, including status of products/features.
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Customer feedback — actively and regularly seek customer feedback; incorporate into product design. Includes customer satisfaction metrics and qualitative insights.
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Team experimentation — developers have authority to create/update specifications during development without requiring outside approval.
Working in Small Batches
Feature level: Work decomposed into rapid-development features, not complex features on long-lived branches released infrequently.
Product level: MVP = prototype with just enough features to enable validated learning about the product and business model.
Why small batches matter:
- Enables short lead times and faster feedback loops
- Allows gathering user feedback quickly (A/B testing)
- An experimental approach to product development is highly correlated with CD technical practices
Team Experimentation
Many teams claiming to be Agile must still follow requirements created by different teams. This:
- Inhibits innovation
- Creates products that don’t delight customers
- Produces worse business results
The ability to try new ideas and update specifications during development, without requiring outside approval, is an important predictor of organizational performance.
The caveat: Experimentation must be combined with:
- Working in small batches
- Making flow of work visible
- Incorporating customer feedback
“This ensures your teams are making well-reasoned, informed choices about design, development, and delivery of work.”
The Virtuous Cycle
The research found a reciprocal relationship between software delivery performance and Lean product management:
Better software delivery performance
→ Enables working in small batches and user research
→ Leads to better products
→ Leads to better organizational performance
Better Lean product management practices
→ Improve software delivery performance
→ Further improve product quality
This reciprocal relationship creates a virtuous cycle.
Impacts of Lean Product Management
Lean product management practices:
- Positively impact software delivery performance
- Stimulate generative culture
- Decrease burnout
- Predict organizational performance (productivity, profitability, market share)
The ability to work and deliver in small batches is especially important because it enables teams to integrate user research into product development and delivery.
Key Tension: Authorization vs. Autonomy
The research is not proposing developers work on whatever they like. The key is structured autonomy:
- Teams can update specs and experiment without outside approval
- But they must do so within a framework of small batches, customer feedback, and flow visibility
When these are combined, informed decisions spread through the organization, and the probability of building features that delight customers and add organizational value increases significantly.