Depending on your sources, the hype of agile may be fading behind buzzwords like lean and DevOps, or it might be dead already. But do not rush to see a grief therapist -- you may not need to change your sprint dashboard or learn new acronyms. Agile is alive. It exists in the way your organization thinks about customers and products rather than team structure, processes or implementation strategy.
For a SaaS (another vanishing acronym) development company, a satisfied customer is a micro success story; the unsatisfied customer is a macro pain. Customers, in general, want more features, specific functionality, customized workflows and personal attention. The level of satisfaction mainly depends on whether the customers’ expectations (rather than needs) are met. The timely delivery of those realistic expectations is your company’s calling card. Managing expectations, however, is a monumental task with myriad variables that are impossible to predict. Then what do you do? You think and act agile.
Agile is your expectations management tool. It works well because your commitments are broken down into pieces to keep clients informed and address immediate needs. It also gives you the flexibility to react to unexpected turbulence while you have some time to work on your road map and technology debt. At the end of the day, the consistency of your road map progress and the loyalty to your company vision will yield success. What yields failure? An uncontrolled amount of debt, whether it is technical or financial. Just ask the management of Kongō Gumi, a 1,400-year-old company that failed to manage its liability.
With USA Technologies' SaaS engineering team, we allocate product priorities, respecting the triad of customers’ expectations, road map plans and technical musts. Our product and technology teams understand the criticality of the balance; hence, for the past several years, we've maintained a 5-2-3 ratio of focusing on customer work, our road map effort and our technology investment.
In simple terms, the customer work is a tactical solution to support one or some customers. That solution often has a limited benefit on product evolution and rarely impacts future sales. The road map effort, on the other hand, is designed to address the needs of a larger set of customers, a wider market or a new niche. The road map is what aligns midterm goals with your company vision. And finally, the technology investment is the enabler of future product development. It is a fuel that drives your road map.
Agile is a way to preserve the equilibrium of your priorities -- by making sure the work allocation within a sprint or a few sprints contains 50% features implementation, 20% road map development and 30% R&D work. We've found that a necessary ingredient for consistent management of a 5-3-2 balance is a technically savvy product team and a business-adept technology team. The mutual appreciation of customer demands and technology needs by both groups translates to a level of collaboration based on trust, respect and a common vision. Once again, the aligned agile thinking shared by product and technology groups removes the friction and accelerates decision making.
The formula only works if it is consistently maintained. And since we do not have scrum masters of project managers (oh, no!), then who is in charge? Surprisingly, the developers are. Giving the developers autonomy on an allocation of over a third of the sprint resources is the most daring move a product manager could make. The result, though, is an empowered group of smart, committed professionals focused on solving a problem. Sounds great, does it not?
Our development team has collectively shaped an agile process for the best fit. We value and protect this creation. We also value and respect the trust of product management and reciprocate with commitment and quality. As the best work comes from a self-organized team, the agile principles of trust and autonomy are the oft-missing ingredients of software development. Getting out of your comfort zone and enabling your team with independence will nurture a powerful, determined lineup that takes success and failure personally. And it is a good thing, unless you still believe that business is not personal…
So, keep your agile hat on. Agile still works great when embraced properly. It works even better when it becomes a part of your thinking. Think agile.
