Disciplined Agile

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.

The term minimum viable product (MVP) has achieved buzzword status in recent times and I’m now hearing people throwing around the term MVP almost on a daily basis. The issue is that it’s common for people to say MVP when they are actually talking about is a minimum business increment (MBI), a minimum marketable feature (MMF), or a minimum marketable release (MMR). Having said that, I prefer the terms MVP and MBI, two different concepts, and rarely use terms like MMF or MMR other than to point people to the first two terms.  Having said that, I'll still cover all four concepts in detail here.

There are several reasons why there is significant confusion in the marketplace:

• These are closely related concepts with very similar names.
• Various authors over the years have used these terms in different ways, thereby muddying the waters.
• Terms naturally evolve over time, and will blur into each other, via natural usage.  

To clear things up, we address the following topics:

1. Defining the terminology
2. Answering common questions
3. An example
4. Summary

1. Defining the Terminology

Figure 1 below overviews how the following terms relate to one another:

• Product. I'm using this term loosely to mean a product, a service, a combination of the two, or a new "big feature" of an existing product. I personally prefer the term offering, but product is the popular term.
• Minimum Viable Product (MVP). An MVP is an investment in learning, an experiment where your goal is to explore what a potential customer wants.  To run this experiment you'll create a version of a product via the least effort possible so as to be used for validated learning about your potential customers. MVPs are experiments to explore a hypothesis about what your customers really want. They aren't to the “real” running version of your end product because they aren't at the level of quality or scale that you would produce for the end product.  Having said that, I have seen MVPs evolve into a real product, or more accurately a real MBI, but more often than not they evolve into something more along the lines of a prototype (which is fine because they're an investment in learning and were never meant to be the real thing). A team typically runs the experiment with a subset of your potential customers to test a new idea, to collect data about it, and thereby discover customers are actually interested in.  Note that the term MVP was coined by Frank Robinson at SyncDev in 2001 and popularized by Eric Ries in his book Lean Startup in 2011.
• Minimum business increment (MBI). An MBI is the smallest piece of value that can be realized by a customer (internal or external) that is consistent with the strategy of your organization.  An MBI adds value for your customers and leads to valuable feedback to the product team that the right functionality is being built and is being built in the right way.  An MBI is a solution that contains all of the pieces that are required for value realization by customers. An MBI, when it is done right, is both an MMF and an MMR. Note that the term MBI was coined by Al Shalloway.
• Minimum Marketable Feature (MMF). An MMF is the smallest piece of functionality that can be delivered that has value to its customers, and thereby value to your organization.  An MMF is a part of an MMR.  The term MMF was first proposed by Denne and Cleland-Huang.
• Minimum Marketable Release (MMR).  Successful products are deployed incrementally into the marketplace over time, each “major” deployment being referred to as a release.  An MMR is the release of a product that has the smallest possible feature set that addresses the current new needs of your customers.  MMRs are used to reduce the time-to-market between releases by reducing the coherent feature set of each release to the smallest increment that offers new value to customers. An MMR is one or more MBIs (ideally it is one).

Figure 1. The relationship between MVP, MBI, MMR, and MMF.

2. Answering Common Questions

We often get asked several common questions around this topic:

• What are the key take-away points?
• Is it minimum or minimal?
• Why differentiate between MBI and MMR?
• Don't we just need the concepts of MVP and MBI?

What are the Key Take-Away Points?

The key take-away points of this article are:

• An MVP is an investment in learning.
• An MBI is an investment in value.
• Don't worry so much about the other terms

Is it Minimum or Minimal?

Given that I’m being picky about terminology, I realized that there isn’t agreement as to whether we should use the term MINIMUM viable product or MINIMAL viable product (and similarly for MBI, MMR, and MMF).  Once again, the words are very close:

• Minimum. The refers to the least quantity or lowest possible amount.
• Minimal.  This refers to barely adequate or sufficient (similar to the agile concept of just barely good enough (JBGE)).  Minimal is an adjective derived from the word minimum.

As you can see, very nuanced.  For better or worse, the industry has settled on the term minimum so that's what we're sticking with.

Why Differentiate Between MBI and MMR?

We wish we didn't have to. Ideally an MMR is a single MBI - your team wants to do just enough work to develop the minimum functionality that provides your customers with value and release it as quickly as you can.  That's an MBI.  Practically though you're sometimes forced to release more than a single MBI in a release.  Perhaps you've decided to have a regular quarterly release cadence. Perhaps your customers prefer large releases (this still occurs in practice, although is becoming less common as your customers become more savvy with regards to incremental releases). These challenges can all be addressed in time, and they should be, but you may not be there yet.

Don't We Just Need The Concepts of MVP and MBI?

That's correct. When you've streamlined your way of working (WoW) you should be at the point where an MBI is an MMF that you release to your customers, so it is also an MMR. The concepts of MMF and MMR are stepping stones towards what you are really aiming for, MBIs. But you might not be there yet, and you may be working with people who are more familiar with older terminology such as MMF and MMR - as a result we recognize in DA that these older terms exist but we avoid them where we can.

3. An Example

Now let’s work through an example of the development of a fictional product using the concept of MVPs and MBIs.  One day while shopping in the local mall my phone ran out of power.  This proved to be a problem for me because I had a conference call that I had to be on, forcing me to cut my shopping trip short to go home and take the call there. This experience made me realize that there’s a potentially untapped market need as I would have been very willing to pay to charge my phone while at the mall. Note: I am fully aware that products such as Safecharge and Brightbox exist, but let’s pretend they don’t for the sake of this example.

Just because I’m willing to pay for this doesn’t mean that others will. To determine whether this could be a profitable endeavour I decide to follow Disciplined Agile’s Exploratory Lifecycle (see Figure 2), which is based on Lean Startup’s hypothesis-driven approach.  My plan is to iteratively run a series of experiments to explore this product idea.

Figure 2. The Exploratory Lifecycle.

Over a several week period I work through a series of minimum viable products (MVPs):

1. Experiment #1: A power bar on a table.  I start with a very simple approach: I talk the mall manager into allowing me to put a table against a wall for a one week period to run an experiment. I plug a power bar into a nearby outlet and put it on the table.  On the wall I have a sign that indicates this is a phone charging station.  Throughout the week I stand by the table telling people about the service and tell them I’ll keep an eye on their phone if they want to go shopping while it charges (I quickly discovered that nobody is willing to actually do that, or at least they’re not willing to trust me, hmmm….). For anyone willing, I have them take a short survey asking them what they think about the service.
2. Experiment #2: I add several common power cords. On the first day several people indicated that they would use the service but unfortunately didn’t have their charging cable with them.  So at the end of the first day I bought several power cables from an electronics store in the mall. Sure enough, over the next few days I had more people willing to charge their phones at my table.  By the end of the week I had gathered a fair bit of data that showed there was general interest in the idea but that a major problem was the inability to safely leave a device to charge while they go off to shop.
3. Experiment #3: I move to a cafe. The following week I run a similar experiment in a cafe a few blocks away from where I live.  Interestingly, I have several people ask to borrow a power cable from me so that they could power their phone while sitting at their own table.  The cafe already has power sockets for people to charge devices and it’s fairly common for people to camp out in the cafe for several hours with a laptop or table plugged into the wall.  After several days it becomes clear to me that a cafe isn’t a good option for a charging station.
4. MVP #4: I add lockable cubby holes.  Over the next week I decide to build out a more sophisticated solution, a wood cabinet that has 16 cubby holes for charging devices.  Each cubbyhole has a specific type of charge cable, so if you want to change a phone you need to use a cubby with the right type of cable.  Each cubby has a door with a physical key lock.  I go back to the mall, in the same location as I’d been in previously, and instead of a survey I interview people to discover what they they think, how they would make it better, and what they’d be willing to pay for such a service.

This series of experiments led me to identify a collection of features that this product should offer:

1. Lockable cubby holes.  People will only leave their phones and other devices if they’re safe.  Each cubby hole needs to be locked in such a way that only the person who left their phone in the cubby can get access to it.  This could be an electronic locks where people can type in a private code or a physical key-based system.
2. Common phone power cords.  We need to be able to support charging a range of devices.  Each cubby should have several common power cord/cables as well as a normal power plug.
3. Easily accessible location that doesn’t offer charging alternatives.  Malls and restaurants are good options, but public areas that already support device charging (like cafes) are not.
4. Payment processing.  We want to support credit card and possibly blue-tooth payment strategies such as Apple Pay.  Payment options need to be investigated still.

Over the next two months we built a minimum business increment (MBI).  The MBI was a large box which had 16 cubby holes for small devices such as phones.  We the each box from folded sheet metal with clear, thick plastic doors so that people can see their devices.  For security and payment processing we built a device that used a small touch screen (it was a tablet) as an input device attached to a card swipe for capturing both credit and debit card payments.  Over several weeks we built five of them, placing three boxes in the mall where we had run our initial experiments and two boxes in another smaller mall on the other side of the city.  

Then we continued to evolve the product via a series of MVPs.  We ran some experiments in a public library where we discovered that library patrons wanted to charge large devices such as tablets and laptops as well as smaller devices.  So we developed a new MBI, a “Library Charging Station” that had eight small device cubbies and six large device cubbies.  We also hired a designer to develop a sleeker looking box when one mall management chain told us that they loved the concept but wouldn’t allow our boxes into their more upscale locations until they were more attractive.

4. Summary

I'll say it again (a paraphrasing of Al Shalloway's advice):

• An MVP is an investment in learning.
• An MBI is an investment in value.

Here's the key difference between the two: With an MVP you are in entrepreneurial mode and need to discover what your customers actually want. MBIs are for when you have an existing product and have a good idea for how to extend it. 

My hope is that this article has helped to clear up some of this confusion.

5. Related Resources

• Minimum business increments (MBIs)
• The most compelling reasons for using MBIs
• The Exploratory (Lean Startup) Lifecycle
• The Release Management process blade
• The Product Management process blade
• Minimum vs. Minimal

I’m happy to announce that the Disciplined Agile Consortium (DAC) is now working with SEMAT. SEMAT, Software Engineering Method and Theory, is an international community of people, companies, and universities.  Led by Ivar Jacobson, SEMAT is working together to create a common ground, or kernel, for software engineering.  As you may know I am one of the original signatories who first indicated their support for the SEMAT effort and am currently a member of the SEMAT advisory board.

So why are we working with SEMAT?  We hope to gain several benefits:

1. Share DA concepts more widely.  We intend to work together to essentialize some of the key concepts that are unique within the Disciplined Agile (DA) toolkit.  This will help to get our leading-edge material into the hands of more people.
2. Leverage essentialized practices.  The SEMAT community has already captured, what they refer to as essentialization of, a wide variety of great practices such as TDD, continuous integration, coordination meetings, and so on.  Our approach in DA is to put such practices into context but not to go into detail describing them (instead we reference existing descriptions).  So, SEMAT provides DA with a great source of existing material to reference.
3. Collaborate with the SEMAT community.  There are many practitioners, trainers, and researchers within the SEMAT community and it’s always a great idea to work with smart people!
4. Enable our customers.  A big advantage with SEMAT is that they’ve published, and continue to publish, a lot of great process material.  This is exactly the type of material that organizations need to support the learning activities of their staff as well as their own process definition efforts.

Of course it is still early days and there is a lot to do.  Please stay tuned here for further updates!

Recommended Reading

• The Essence of Software Engineering: The SEMAT Kernel
• The SEMAT Home Page

An important aspect of Support that is easily forgotten is the need to build out your infrastructure to enable your support efforts.  This may include:

• Creating a support knowledgebase so that your Support Engineers can capture solutions to the problems they solve.
• Provide access to the support knowledgebase to support self-service by end users.  This access is often limited for privacy reasons – end users should have access to solutions to common problems but not the details to specific incidents.
• A support environment to simulate problems.  In some cases, such as an online trading system perhaps, you don’t want your Support Engineers trying to diagnose end user problems on the live system itself due to potential side effects of doing so.
• Installing communication systems such as chat software and a phone/call in system.
• Automated support systems such as integrated voice response (IVR) and artificial intelligence (AI)/bots

Figure 1. High-level architecture for a Support environment (click on it for larger version).

Related Reading

• The Support Process Blade
• The IT Operations Process Blade
• Disciplined DevOps

I recently ran into The Oath for an Agile Coach.  There are clearly some great ideas in the oath and it would be hard to argue that you wouldn’t want to adopt the advice contained within it.  So I won’t do that.  However, I do feel that there are some serious challenges surrounding the oath but that with a bit of hard work we could do better.

Some Great Ideas Here

Frankly, what’s not to like?  The oath promotes the idea that coaches should do no harm, that they’re guests, that they should respect learnings, that they value discretion, and many other wonderful philosophies.  Several of them are arguably a bit naive, for example:

• First, do no harm. From one point of view the definition of an agile coach is to do harm – harm to the status quo, harm to the incumbent mindset, harm to the corporate politicians who rose to power building the current environment that the coach is there to help the organization improve.  You wouldn’t be much of a coach if you weren’t doing harm to the bad stuff in your organization.
• I prevent dysfunction.  Really?  I’ve worked in many environments that are “target rich” when it comes to dysfunction.  I’m expected to help prevent all of these dysfunctions right away?  I’m supposed to prevent dysfunction that is beyond my current scope of influence?  Of course not.  I need to help the people that I’m working with to identify and prioritize their pains, then help them address these pains as and when it is appropriate to do so (if ever).  Clearly the advice in the oath is context sensitive and it isn’t meant to be taken literally.

It’s clear to me that a lot of smart people have put a lot of effort into the oath, that they’ve thought it through, and are honestly trying to make things better.  I also believe that this is a step in the right direction, although at the time of this writing there are some serious challenges surrounding it that can and should be addressed.

A Few Serious Challenges

First and foremost, we should give the authors of the oath the benefit of the doubt and assume that they aren’t doing the things I’m about to describe on purpose.  Although what I have to say is harsh, I honestly believe that the authors have their hearts in the right place but have not thought through the implications of what they’ve started.  So here goes.

The oath is deceptive and as a result possibly unethical.  The reason why I say this is that they claim to have based the coach’s oath on the The Hippocratic Oath (which I’m sure they’ve actually done).  The problem is that they’ve merely skimmed the surface of the Hippocratic Oath, lifting ideas such as “First, do no harm” (which the oath doesn’t actually say, that’s the Hollywood interpretation of it) without also adopting the context in which the Hippocratic Oath is taken.  This is important.  New medical practitioners, after years of training, are asked to take the oath, or something similar, by medical schools.  These schools are governed and the medical professionals themselves are governed.  Control mechanisms are in place to ensure that the people who take the oath know what they’re doing and work in a trustworthy manner.  Therein lies the rub – no such governance exists for agile coaching and I suspect the vast majority of agile coaches would chaff at the suggestion.

To see why this is an issue consider the following example.  I have no medical training or background, with the exception of taking a few first aid courses over the years.  Come to think of it, by agile standards I have more than enough medical training to be considered a Certified Surgery Master (CSM), so it’s all good. I have just now recited the Hippocratic Oath and have pledged to abide by it.  As a result I now feel that I am qualified to offer plastic surgery procedures as I’ve heard that this is a lucrative business to be in.  If you would like a face lift, liposuction, or augmentation of a body part please contact me to arrange a procedure.  You can trust me because I’ve recited the Hippocratic Oath and I’m a CSM.  What?  You’re not interested? I’ve pledged to do no harm, so you can trust me.

I think that you inherently know it would be a bad thing for me to perform plastic surgery on you.  I’m obviously not qualified.  Therein lies the rub.  I could easily advertise that I’ve pledged the oath, tell people about my CSM credentials, and make it sound like I’m qualified, particularly to people who don’t have much of a background in agile.  In fact, recently in Toronto, a 19-year old woman did something very similar to this and as you’d expect it didn’t work out well for the recipients of her surgery endeavours.

By claiming that the agile coach’s oath is based on the Hippocratic Oath the authors are taking advantage of something called “prestige association.”  The Hippocratic Oath is prestigious – the people who pledge it have to work very hard to be asked to pledge it and are subsequently held to its high standards throughout their careers.  By explicitly associating the agile coaching oath with the Hippocratic Oath the prestige of the latter is conferred to the former.  This is deceptive at best and unethical at worst.  I believe we can be better than this.

How We Can Do Better

It isn’t appropriate to complain about the Agile Coach’s Oath without also providing some possible ways to fix it.  Here are my initial thoughts:

1. Avoid prestige association. The very first thing, and easiest thing, that could be done is to stop comparing this oath to the Hippocratic Oath.
2. Define paths to becoming a great coach.  A straightforward, and relatively easy, way to add real value would be to put together a path, or more likely several paths, that people could follow to become a great coach.
3. Help people to follow those paths. In short, build a respectable agile coaching guild that focuses on helping people over making money off of them.
4. We need to respect ourselves. This is an observation for agilists in general, but particularly important for agile coaches.  At the present moment the Agile Coach’s Oath is yet another vapid agile band wagon for people to jump onto without having to do any real work.  As coaches we lament the large number of lame agile “certifications” that are little more than participation ribbons, so perhaps it’s time we choose to say enough is enough.  We know that effective coaching requires skill, knowledge, and experience that require years of hard effort to earn.  Just like the medical community requires years of education and training before extending the privilege of asking someone to take the Hippocratic Oath, we could choose to do something similar.  But first we’d need to respect ourselves enough to actually do that.

I believe the people who developed The Oath for an Agile Coach have good intentions.  They’ve gotten a great start on an interesting and potentially valuable idea. But, they need to follow through and make it something real if they really want this oath to be meaningful.  I hope they choose to build a vibrant community that does exactly that.  Time will tell.

Related Postings

• What Makes a Good Disciplined Agile Coach
• Why is it so hard to find qualified agile coaches?
• The Agile Enterprise Coach