Insights
Mastering success in Agile product engineering
Sujith Nair, Director, Product Engineering
Master Agile product engineering and gain a competitive edge. Learn to adopt Agile practices, optimize workflows, and deliver high-quality products that meet evolving customer needs.
Sujith Nair, Director, Product Engineering
Agile product engineering is a dynamic, fast-paced approach to creating digital products. The Agile principles and methodologies that product engineers apply feature self-managed teams empowered to achieve specific business objectives.
Agile methodologies focus on rapid and frequent deliverables that can be evaluated and used to determine the next steps. It's an iterative approach that helps teams become more responsive, adaptive, and accountable and projects more visible, flexible, better, and faster. Agile is a way to manage a project by splitting it into many steps. It values high-speed development and quality delivery over a project's lifespan, which requires constant collaboration with all stakeholders and continuous improvement at every step. Agile also aligns all projects with business goals by prioritizing new product features based on value, helping companies remain competitive while improving outcomes.
DIVIDER
What is Agile product engineering?
Agile product engineering unites teams and creates a better end product. Teams develop products that users want by responding to user feedback with prototypes. Teams break down and group product goals into measurable chunks of work with rapid product development cycles. Each problem solved is a "minimum marketable feature" that can be used and reused for many future iterations.
Agile product engineering has become the gold standard approach to digital product development. Each Software Development Lifecycle stage (SDLC) stage requires vigilant transparency, accountability, and cross-functional team collaboration. However, Agile teams and their expertise do not come out of the box. Agile is a methodology that combines people, software, processes, architectures, applications, workflows, and systems that follow particular techniques and principles-
- Continuous feedback collection from customers means that designs are tracking with customer needs. Continuous feedback is gathered from customers to track design according to customer needs.
- Collaboration between design, engineering, and business functions enables teams to understand each other's needs and challenges.
- Each iteration delivers a working product.
- Continuous testing is conducted at all phases of product development and is viewed not as a process step but as a desired outcome.
- Shared notes and learnings
Every product engineering team may approach things differently, but when they follow Agile practices instead of traditional waterfall methods, projects, and therefore products, often result in massive gains in business agility, customer satisfaction, quality outcomes, and shorter release cycles.
Instead of spending months or years on the design and then carefully building one perfect prototype, teams build many and test them in myriad ways.
Agile has become the dominant standard for creating digital products. Agile product development initiatives experience a 64% success rate, making them 1.5x more successful than traditional linear waterfall development (source: Zippia).
Agile projects also have the potential to improve customer experience by 30%, increase operational performance by 30 to 50%, and reduce time to market by at least 40% (source: McKinsey).
Yet, despite this great potential for success, many Agile projects fail. Why? Mostly because Agile is less about technology and more about mindset. This means problems are often unique and usually occur due to differences within organizations, people, and the implementation of Agile projects. Additionally, Agile's rapid, intricate cross-functional structure means that one minor mistake can exponentially lead to many bigger mistakes.
DIVIDER
How to avoid failure in Agile product engineering
Because Agile requires tightly combining people and technology with processes, methods, values, culture, and mindset, no single solution can address the problems that businesses can face in Agile product engineering initiatives. Instead, organizations and teams can take actions to avoid, lessen, or eliminate failure in Agile product engineering.
- Adopt an Agile mindset: Agile principles emphasize collaboration, quick delivery, continuous improvement, adaptability, and customer feedback. It is paramount for the product owner, scrum master, and development team to imbibe an Agile mindset that embraces customer needs and faster production cycles to deliver a well-designed, high-quality, and maintainable product.
- Frequent feedback:
- Gather feedback from customers on what worked and what didn't or where the team went wrong.
- Adapt to customer needs by changing the backlog.
- Repeat the cycle.
- Ensure teams are Agile fluent. Lack of experience with Agile methods and inadequate training are two main reasons Agile projects fail.
To groom proficient Agile teams, organizations can encourage and offer Agile lessons and certifications, such as CSM (Certified Scrum Master), PSM (Professional Scrum Master), SAFe Agilist, PMI-ACP (PMI Agile Certified Practitioner), and Certified Agile Process Owner (CAPO). Agile credentials lead to understanding Agile methodologies, successful Agile implementations, and expertise.
Organizations can motivate teams to get these credentials by offering paid training. They can also encourage on-the-job training to grow and broaden in-house Agile expertise among teams.
DIVIDER
Use of technology is vital:
Modularize architecture, use microservices, ensure secured systems, and modernize the product continuously. Implement engineering practices such as pairing, TDD, refactoring, and continuous delivery, enabling the team to respond to customer needs at an evolving pace.
- Maintain small, nimble Agile teams. The size of an Agile team depends on the project's scope. However, Agile teams should be small enough to complete projects within the timeframe of a sprint, a time-boxed cycle that typically lasts 2-4 weeks. Teams that are too big can make it difficult to implement Agile practices that count on constant collaboration and continuous improvement. Large Agile teams tend to be less involved, flexible and responsive
- Competitive edge through innovation: Innovation in product engineering enables teams to launch products faster, respond to changing consumer preferences, reduce the risk of failure, and increase team productivity.
Servant leadership to foster Agile mindset: Lack of leadership support ranks high as a reason for Agile project failure. Leaders should focus on removing obstacles and enable to team to foster Agile mindset. The leadership team must understand the usefulness and implications of Agile development frameworks.
At the minimum, an Agile team structure consists of:
- A Scrum Master, a facilitator who keeps teams on track, helps resolve issues and avoid roadblocks, oversees the execution of the product roadmap, guides the development lifecycle, ensures open communication between team members, manages the backlog, and prioritizes it based on value.
- A Product Owner represents the stakeholders and sets the development direction, defining and prioritizing product features and keeping up with trends.
- Team members who create and deliver the project.
- The average size of an Agile team is between 7 and 9 members. Small team sizes keep team members highly engaged, productive, and responsible. Small Agile teams (less than 10) improve productivity, flexibility, and the quality of work.
Agile can be applied to projects of any size. Large-scale projects are made by combining the appropriate teams to handle the workload requirements and meet the broader business objectives.
DIVIDER
Agile - The gold standard in product engineering
Agile product engineering creates a dynamic cross-functional team environment prioritizing continuous improvement, collaboration, fast delivery, adaptability, and customer value. Agile methods and principles help teams become more efficient, flexible, accountable, and engaged in projects, each other, and all stakeholders. Agile experts create fast, iterative, efficient, and fluid environments while embracing emerging technologies and assuring business goals.
Product engineering, based on Agile, is the standard for developing digital products (software, mobile apps, websites). It involves the full spectrum of planning, designing, building, testing, integrating, deploying, maintaining, and retiring digital products. Consequently, product engineers require the Agile approach's values to deliver fast delivery of constantly improving digital products. Agile product engineering helps businesses respond quickly to changing requirements, demands, and market shifts to compete with their products in this digital age.
For more ways to reach success in Agile product engineering, contact us here. Our product engineering experts at UST can help your business shift to the promising Agile world of fast and consistently enhanced quality digital product delivery.
DIVIDER
Resources
https://www.ust.com/en/ust-product-engineering/softwareproductengineering
https://www.ust.com/en/what-we-do/digital-transformation/agile-transformation