The Product world is giving up on Agile. Just listen to Marty Cagan or Melissa Perri or other pundits on Linkedin.
What’s going on? Let me try to share my take via a short business fable.
Picture BuzzCorp (Many of you won’t have to use too much imagination). They’ve invested significant efforts in developing software and products using Agile.
They formed agile teams (but a deeper look shows those are the existing component/functional teams using agile methods)
They manage Features/Stories in JIRA/ADO (but those are the functional slices that these teams can accomplish, rather than useful product slices)
They’ve “transformed”.
There’s some flow of “stories”, maybe even “features”. 3 questions are asked every day. Velocity is counted.
They are doing Agile. At the team level.
But.
Products still require collaboration across many teams, and typically, many months pass before something potentially valuable is integrated and available for customer feedback, not to say release.
BuzzCorp Product Managers don’t understand why they’re expected to become “Product Owners” of these teams.
So, the engineering/IT organization assigned “Product Owners” (who create stories, manage the backlog, and manage team interactions but don’t own a product or even product-level outcomes).
BuzzCorp adopts an agile scaling framework to help them manage this crazy web of dependencies. (But once again, they ignore the intent and principles and take the easy way out)
BuzzCorp Product leaders think Agile is a sham. They start looking at an alternative.
What will happen when they install a product operating model (you can probably guess …)?
Here’s the thing:
Agile has become very popular. Implementing it has become “the thing you do,” and many organizations invested in transformations but only took half measures. They didn’t change their structure to align with products, and they didn’t develop a product management capability. These are two classic smells of “Agile Theater”.
Product Thought Leaders such as Melissa Perri and Marty Cagan mostly see Agile Theater out there, because it is indeed way too prevalent.
Agile Thought Leaders and Professional Scrum Trainers mostly share the frustration with this theater.
If you look at what we teach in Professional Scrum Product Ownership workshops and help our clients with in the trenches, you’ll see an approach to Agile Product Management that is very different than the backlog manager product owner the product world is complaining about. Take a look at the misunderstood stances of product ownership for example…
What I like about the rise of the Product Operating Model is the second chance it provides us to take a look at our structure, identify our products, and reorganize around empowered product teams for real this time, and provide them with authentic product leadership performing Product Ownership for these products.
That’s the idea at least. I hope we won’t end up with a Product Operating Model Theater next. I wouldn’t be surprised if we do though.
But maybe leaders have had enough of following “by the book” approaches. Maybe they understand it’s time for a “slower burn,” more thoughtful, and principles-oriented evolution rather than a mandated quick revolution. I hope the interest in Product Operating Models will allow us to fix some of the agile theater.