CHAPTER 7 Beyond Lean and Agile

People are always searching for a silver bullet to create products, and there is always a willing industry—ready and waiting to serve with books, coaching, training, and consulting. But there is no silver bullet, and inevitably people figure this out. That's when the backlash begins. As I write this, it's in vogue to criticize both Lean and Agile.

I have no doubt that many people and teams are in some measure disappointed with the results from their adoption of both Lean and Agile. And I understand the reasons for this. That said, I am convinced that Lean and Agile values and principles are here to stay. Not so much the particular manifestations of these methods that many teams use today, but the core principles behind them. I would argue that they both represent meaningful progress, and I would never want to go backward on those two fronts.

But as I said, they are not silver bullets either, and as with any tool, you have to be smart about how you use it. I meet countless teams that claim to be following Lean principles; yet, they work for months on what they call an MVP, and they really don't know what they have and whether it will sell until they've spent substantial time and money—hardly in the spirit of Lean. Or they go way overboard and think they have to test and validate everything, so they go nowhere fast.

And, as I just pointed out, the way Agile is practiced in most product companies is hardly Agile in any meaningful sense.

The best product teams I know have already moved past how most teams practice these methods—leveraging the core principles of Lean and Agile, but raising the bar on what they're trying to achieve and how they work.

When I see these teams, they may frame the issues a little differently, sometimes using different nomenclature, but at the heart, I see three overarching principles at work:

1. Risks are tackled up front, rather than at the end. In modern teams, we tackle these risks prior to deciding to build anything. These risks include value risk (whether customers will buy it), usability risk (whether users can figure out how to use it), feasibility risk (whether our engineers can build what we need with the time, skills, and technology we have), and business viability risk (whether this solution also works for the various aspects of our business—sales, marketing, finance, legal, etc.).
2. Products are defined and designed collaboratively, rather than sequentially. They have finally moved beyond the old model in which a product manager defines requirements, a designer designs a solution that delivers on those requirements, and then engineering implements those requirements, with each person living with the constraints and decisions of the ones that preceded. In strong teams, product, design, and engineering work side by side, in a give‐and‐take way, to come up with technology‐powered solutions that our customers love and that work for our business.
3. Finally, it's all about solving problems, not implementing features. Conventional product roadmaps are all about output. Strong teams know it's not only about implementing a solution. They must ensure that solution solves the underlying problem. It's about business results.

You will see that I keep these three overarching principles front and center throughout this book.