Facing the Reality in Product Management

For some reason Software Development is somehow so far from the physical world that it is very easy to neglect the truth for a very long time. Managing products is one area where I have faced some horrendous gaps between the plans and the real world.

This picture of Chinese traffic jam has become one of my favorites lately:

Unfortunately I think it characterizes the amount of things some people think can be done in parallel. A Product Roadmap that has nine things that should be developed in parallel. By one team. Of about nine persons. If you say it out loud like this, it's probably evident that it's not going to happen. But if you just add boxes to a PowerPoint, it's deceitfully easy to just add one more box. ...and yet one more.

My solution asks for another picture. 

"There you go. I think your Roadmap is great, but it only has this one flaw. Everything you have there needs to fit through this funnel." Well the diameter of the funnel of course depends on the team size, but I think one-piece-flow would be something to strive for.

Doing things in priority order one by one. Creating the features that offer the biggest customer impact and added value one after another. Doing things pragmatically and keeping the focus. Let's try to get there!

Children are Excellent Teachers

I recently had a discussion with my son's kindergarten teacher and she told me how my son's group has been teaming up very nicely. They play together and everyone has found their place. Some are carrying sticks, some build things from those while some of the others are more involved with the planning. When, inevitably, there's conflict, they say they are sorry and the situations resolve quickly. And when they do sports, everyone is rooting for the others like crazy!

If preschool children can do this, why is it so hard for us grownups?

When the organization is still going through the agile transformation, it's probably not uncommon that people only think about their own tasks. "I have done my part. It's not my fault if the others don't keep up." But in an cross-functional Agile team you are not merely accountable for your tasks. There are no "your tasks". The team has goals and the team members are ALL equally responsible for the results.

This will probably become clearer over time. But in a bigger organization, I'd like to reach the next level. I see an analogy between one team and a Sprint and between several teams and a Release. My personal vision of a larger organization is such that teams working on the same product pull one rope. If one team is struggling and the others have finished their commitments, they will help. No team is left behind! And maybe in a larger organization this would scale up still one level, but I have no first hand experience about that.

Great things are achieved through doing things together!