While responding to change is important, there still must be some planning in agile to develop a product backlog, align development work with milestones, determine dependencies and establish an estimated delivery date. A business case for a new product or project determines the value of some effort and allocates resources of people and money. From a business case, I work with teams to create an agile product/project charter. Developing a product vision by creating user personas, empathy maps, or journey lines is critical. Identifying and priorizing features then naturally leads to product roadmapping. I then use a liftoff or team launch to help align expectations, motivate the team, and conduct additionally planning. A rapid discovery session can be used to confirm scope, objectives, and high-level plan. It is critical to get stakeholders involved. I also coach teams to get agreement from customers, including the rules of engagement for feedback and assessment at demos, product reviews, etc.

The team and the product owner must then take the large stack of requirements and break it into meaningful and estimate-able chunks, so that they can do the work by “eating the elephant one bite a time.” Proper planning, prioritization, and alignment can lead to 80% of value from 20% of work. From here, the team can do release planning to define a release schedule and product increments, and then refine the work iterations in to sprints. The whole process requires an immense amount of communication and collaboration, but allows for a high level of alignment and expectation management. It sets the stage for an incremental and iterative approach to product development that delivers high value to customers.

Until the next iteration . . .

Jason