Disciplined Agile

By now many of you will have heard about the tragic loss of Mike Beedle, one of the signatories of the Agile Manifesto and the thought leader behind Enterprise Scrum.  Mike passed away on March 24th and leaves behind a family that includes six children.

For those of us who were lucky enough to know Mike we’ll remember him as a generous and intelligent gentleman.  He made significant and ongoing contributions to the agile community and we’ll all miss him.

The Disciplined Agile Consortium is proud to have donated to the Memorial Fund for Mike Beedle’s Family and we hope that you consider doing the same.

Rest in peace Mike.

A common question that we get is what is the difference between Product Owners (POs) and Product Managers? From a Disciplined Agile (DA) perspective, it’s a matter of strategy vs. tactics:

• • Product Owners are more tactical in practice.  POs work closely with delivery teams to ensure they build the right functionality in a timely manner. POs will transform the high-level vision of the Product Manager into detailed requirements. To do this they work closely with a range of stakeholders for the product, including non-customer stakeholders such as finance, security, operations, support, audit, and others.  Tactical activities such as attending team coordination meetings, organizing demos, doing sufficient analysis to ensure that requirements are ready to be worked on, and being involved with ongoing testing efforts easily add up to a full-time job.
  • Product Managers are more strategic in practice. They should be focused on the long-term vision for the product, on observing trends in the marketplace, on identifying new potential outcomes or themes to be supported by the product, on supporting the sales/adoption of the product, and on ensuring the product meets the needs of the value stream(s) the product is involved with. Effective Product Managers tend to be very customer focused, although recognize that this needs to be tempered by the constraints and capabilities of your organization. The activities that Product Managers are responsible for – product marketing, supporting product sales/adoption, budgeting, long-term envisioning, customer care, and of course supporting the solution delivery team(s) – can easily add up to a full time job.

We Need to Collaborate

As you can see in the following diagram, the role of Product Manager is different, yet overlapping, with that of a Product Owner (PO).  The PO will spend the majority of their time on tactical activities, including working with the team to communicate stakeholder needs to them and working with stakeholders to elicit and prioritize their needs. The Product Manager, on the other hand, spends most of their time on more strategic issues, collaborating closely with customers (and potential customers) to identify their potential needs.

Figure 1. Example of rolling wave planning for product functionality (click on image for larger version).

There is clearly overlap between strategic, long-term thinking and tactical, short-term implementation.  Product Owners are responsible for the Product Backlog in Scrum, what Disciplined Agile DAD (DAD) teams might refer to as a Work Item List or in the case of teams who have adopted one of the lean lifecycles a Work Item Pool, and some of the items in the backlog/list/pool might be several months away from being implemented (if ever).  In Figure 1, these are items that fall into the yellow or red timing areas, or even the grey area.  Product Managers, being responsible for strategic thinking, will be focused on high-level outcomes or themes for the product.  They may even be focused on more concrete, yet still high level, epics or features.  So we see overlap in the Product Manager’s high-level strategic focus and the Product Owner’s tactical focus, indicating the need for collaboration between the two roles so that the tactical decisions reflect the overall strategy, and the overall strategy is informed by the realities faced on the ground by the delivery team.

Please note that the timing of “short term” and “long term” will vary by product.  In the case of Figure 1 the long-term planning horizon is around the three month point (where the diagram shifts from yellow to red).  That’s just an example, from one team.  We’ve worked with some teams where the long-term planning horizon was anything more than a month.  We’ve also worked with other teams where the long-term planning horizon was closer to a year (they’ve since shortened that considerably).

Shouldn’t Product Owners Also Address Strategic Issues?

Here are a few thoughts to help answer this question:

1. Everyone should consider strategic issues.  Some people, particularly those focused on Scrum, will tell you that Product Owners should also be focused on strategic issues.  It’s certainly good for POs to understand the long-term strategy for the product that they are focused on. In short, POs, like everyone else, should be Enterprise Aware.
2. Each role requires a different, and comprehensive, skillset.  Each of these roles are challenging enough by itself. You’ll have a much better chance of finding someone with the skills to work tactically, and someone with the skills to work strategically, than finding a single person with both skillsets (or the time and inclination to pick up both).
3. There is often too much work for one person.  As we argued earlier, the day-to-day tactical work tends to be a full-time job (and often more) as does the strategic Product Management work.  As a result, you are often motivated to tease these two roles out into separate positions.
4. These are roles, not positions. In straightforward, non-scaled situations, it is common to see a single person taking on both of these roles.  This is common in start-up organizations where the company simply can’t afford to have two people to do this work.  It’s also common with new products in general because it isn’t yet obvious whether the product will be sufficiently successful in the marketplace to warrant much investment in long-term strategic thinking around it.

So, as usual, the answer is “it depends.”  As we like to say in DA, context counts which is why choice is good.

Related Reading

• The Product Management process blade
• Where Do Product Owners (POs) Come From?
• Rolling Wave Planning for Product Roadmaps

I’m happy to announce that Introduction to Disciplined Agile Delivery 2nd Edition: A Small Agile Team’s Journey from Scrum to Disciplined DevOps is now available.  The 111 page book sells for $9.99 US for the paperback edition and $3.99 US for the Kindle edition.  The book is currently available on Amazon.com in the US and will soon be available on Amazon in other countries as per Amazon’s usual deployment strategy.

This book provides a quick overview of how agile software development works from beginning-to-end.  It describes Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD), the first of four levels of the Disciplined Agile (DA) process decision framework, and works through a case study describing a typical agile team’s experiences adopting a DA approach.  The book describes how the team develops the first release of a mission-critical application while working in a legacy enterprise environment.  It describes their experiences from beginning-to-end, starting with their initial team initiation efforts through construction and finally to deploying the solution into production.  It also describes how the team stays together for future releases, overviewing their process improvement efforts from their Scrum-based beginnings through to a lean continuous delivery approach that fits in with their organization’s evolving DevOps strategy.

What’s Different in This Edition

In the 2.5 years since the first edition was released DAD, and to a greater extent the DA toolkit in general, has evolved. Here are the major changes:

• Chapter 3 was completely rewritten to reflect the changes to DAD, in particular to addition of the Continuous Delivery: Agile lifecycle as well as the evolution of several process goals.
• Chapter 12 was rewritten to describe how the team, and more importantly the organization they work within, evolve into a Disciplined DevOps strategy. In the first edition we just took the team to the Continuous Delivery: Lean point, but in this edition we take them right into DevOps.
• Appendix A was rewritten to reflect the latest release of the DA toolkit. When the first edition was released the 2.1 version of the toolkit was overviewed in the Appendix. Since then the toolkit has been expanded to address four levels – DAD, Disciplined DevOps, Disciplined Agile IT, and now Disciplined Agile Enterprise (DAE) – instead of the original three. With the addition of DAE the DA toolkit provides true insight for how to begin supporting business agility within your organization.
• General updates were made throughout the book, including the update of several diagrams to reflect the evolution of DAD, expanding on a few ideas that readers said they wanted to hear more about, and fixing a few outstanding grammar errors.
• The book is using a slightly larger format, 6 inches by 9 inches, to match An Executive’s Guide to Disciplined Agile format. Similarly we also updated the cover to be consistent with that book.

Quality requirements, also known as non-functional requirements (NFRs), quality of service (QoS) or technical requirements, address issues such as reliability, availability, security, privacy, and many other quality issues.  The following diagram, which overviews architectural views and concerns, provides a great source of quality requirement types (the list of concerns).  Good sources for quality requirements include your enterprise architects and operations staff, although any stakeholder is a potential source for them.

Figure 1. Architectural views and concerns.

Why Are Quality Requirements Important?

Stakeholders will describe quality requirements at any time, but it’s particularly important to focus on them during your initial scoping efforts during Inception as you can see in the goal diagram below for Explore Initial Scope.  Considering quality requirements early in the lifecycle is important because:

1. Quality requirements drive important architecture decisions. When you are identifying your architecture strategy you will often find that it is the NFRs that will be the primary drivers of your architecture.
2. Quality requirements will drive some aspects of your test strategy. Because they tend to be cross-cutting, and because they tend to drive important aspects of your architecture, they tend to drive important aspects of your test strategy.  For example, security requirements will drive the need to support security testing, performance requirements will drive the need for stress and load testing, and so on. These testing needs in turn may drive aspects of your test environments and your testing tool choices.
3. Quality requirements will drive acceptance criteria for functional requirements (such as stories).  Quality requirements are typically system-wide thus they apply to many, and sometimes all of your functional requirements.  Part of ensuring that your solution is potentially consumable each iteration is ensuring that it fulfills its overall quality goals, including applicable quality requirements.  This is particularly true with life-critical and mission-critical solutions.

Capturing Quality Requirements

Figure 2 depicts the goal diagram for Explore Scope.  As you can see, there are several strategies for exploring and potentially capturing quality requirements.

Figure 2. The goal diagram for Explore Scope (click to enlarge).

Let’s explore the three strategies, which can be combined, for capturing quality requirements:

1. Technical stories.  A technical story is a documentation strategy where the quality requirement  is captured as a separate entity that is meant to be addressed in a single iteration.  Technical stories are in effect the quality requirement equivalent of a user story. For example “The system will be unavailable to end users no more than 30 seconds a week” and “Only the employee, their direct manager, and manager-level human resource people have access to salary information about said employee” are both examples of technical stories.
2. Acceptance criteria for individual functional requirements.  Part of the strategy of ensuring that a work item is done at the end of an iteration is to verify that it meets all of its acceptance criteria.  Many of these acceptance criterions will reflect quality requirements specific to an individual usage requirement, such as “Salary information read-only accessible by the employee,”, “Salary information read-only accessible by their direct manager”, “Salary information read/write accessible by HR managers”, and “Salary information is not accessible to anyone without specific access rights”.  So in effect quality requirements are implemented because they become part of your “done” criteria.
3. Explicit list.  Capture quality requirements separately from your work item list in a separate artifact.  This provides you with a reminder for the issues to consider when formulating acceptance criteria for your functional requirements.  In the Unified Process this artifact was called a supplementary specification.

Of course a fourth option would be to not capture quality requirements at all.  In theory this would work in very simple situations but it clearly runs a significant risk of the team building a solution that doesn’t meet the operational needs of the stakeholders.  This is often a symptom of a teams only working with a small subset of their stakeholder types (e.g. only working with end users but not operations staff, senior managers, and so on).

Related Resources

• Strategies for Implementing Quality Requirements
• Strategies for Verifying Quality Requirements
• Develop Test Strategy
• Identify Architecture Strategy

Building on the ideas captured by the Disciplined Agile Principles and the Disciplined Agile Manifesto, there are several agile/lean philosophies that are critical to success in Product Management.  These philosophies are:

1. Be customer driven.  The needs of customers, and more importantly the potential desires of customers that they are not even be aware of, should drive your Product Management decisions.  The implication is that Product Managers must work closely with existing customers, and furthermore must invest time to identify and understand potential customers so as to grow the market for their product.
2. Address the full value stream.  An important part of being customer driven is to understand that it is the full customer experience with your organization, not just the “products”, that must be addressed.  You need to understand the full value stream(s) that your product(s) are part from beginning to end from the customer’s point of view – Product Management is about solutions and not just software.
3. Take an experimental approach. People often don’t know what they want, will struggle to describe what they want, often won’t tell you want they want, and will change their minds anyway.  The point is that you need to go beyond asking people for their requirements if you want to identify what to offer your customers.  Modern thinking is to take an experimental approach via creation of minimal viable products (MVPs) to get something in front of potential customers to determine what they actually want – you do this through observing the features of your MVP that they use, how they use them, and the features that they don’t use.  This strategy was popularized by Eric Ries via his Lean Startup work and is captured in DAD’s Exploratory lifecycle.
4. Release incrementally and often.  Releasing smaller increments more often enables you to reduce the feedback cycle with your customers, which in turn enables you to learn quickly and thus react to customer needs faster.
5. Embrace change.  Customer needs and desires change, often rapidly.  New competitors enter the market with different or improved offerings.  New technologies and platforms are introduced and then evolved.  To be trite, the only constant is change.  Successful product managers not only accept this but they embrace it.  The implication is to adopt flexible, light-weight strategies.
6. Plan strategically and react tactically.  Products should be planned strategically in the long term yet implemented tactically in the short term.  The common agile strategy is to take a what is known as a rolling wave planning approach where detailed planning occurs for what should be delivered in near team incremental releases but for future releases the planning is high-level and less detailed the further in the future something is.

Being a Product Manager is an interesting and exciting role.  We hope that this blog has been valuable for you.