Agile Product Life Cycle

What is Agile Product Life Cycle?

Agile product life cycle is an end to end product development process which responds to faster changes in the market. This is not achieved by driving the development process using one of the Agile methodologies such as Scrum, Kanban, XP (extreme programming).

There are four phases of Agile product Life cycle:

1. Discover
2. Develop
3. Deployment
4. Maintenance

This can be further simplified through the lean concept by dividing deployment into two- launch, measure & learn.

Similarly, maintenance can be bifurcated as “Iterate to achieve maturity” and “Kill if declined”.

To build an organization that creates a customer-centric product, following end to end Agile product life cycle makes the product objectives achievable quickly. Fig 1 depicts each product life cycle phase in the Agile product maturity curve. These two curves show the product maturity life cycle aligned with the fast pace of Agile product management.

Fig1 Agile product Life cycle

What we see is normally a “water-scrum-fall”. Here, the development team follows one of the agile methodologies to ship faster, but product management and design still work in silos. There is a need for shared knowledge and hand-in-hand collaboration among design, product management and development. The basic value of the Agile product life cycle is to create business and user value which is possible when product management, design and development together respond to change faster to create business/customer value( Fig 2). One of the principles of the Agile product life cycle is to build user value.

Fig 2 ( A true Product Team)

What are the principles of Agile product Life cycle?

1. Solve right problem
2. Think big
3. Start small
4. Ship to learn
5. Build user value

This is the foundation of building a world-class product. These principles must be followed during the Agile product lifecycle ( Fig 1) to realize and build a product.

How to build an organization following end to end Agile product life cycle process?

Fig 3 (End to end Agile product life cycle Framework)

To make a world-class product, the product team should follow the framework that focuses on addressing the right problem, build it, measure and learn fast to address the customer need. In nutshell, the above framework in the fig3 depicts discovery, building, launching, measure, learn. In agile, people get precedence over processes, hence the product team and other stakeholders must work collaboratively, based on their defined roles. The most important thing to notice in the above framework is that scrum development is just a part of the overall agile product building framework.

Agile Product Life Cycle — People over process

In each phase of the agile product life cycle, people roles and responsibilities take precedence over the processes (Fig 4). The product team and stakeholders should perform the activities through cross-collaboration and communication. The aforementioned roles can vary slightly based on org structure, but the framework works well when roles are defined and responsibilities followed as defined.

Fig 4

The agile product life cycle framework can be used as per the organization need however the basic foundation is build-measure-learn and take ownership. The collaborative environment and cross-communication with other product teams and with stakeholders are important throughout the journey.

Tactics and strategy for Product Manager (PM) in Agile product life cycle

The mindset of the Product Manager makes is the key reason for their success. PM leads with influence in Agile World. Critical thinking and problem-solving are two important aspects whereas a strategic approach while driving a roadmap that changes rapidly include the PM ability to be tactful, notable, and quick.

Some of the important attributes that are mentioned in Fig 5 show the journey from being a good PM to a fantabulous one. Only critical thinking and problem-solving skills will not work if strategic thinking to handle the product team, cross-product team and leadership are missing. Most importantly, in the Covid era, these actionable and behavioural strategic aspects help any PM to define a clear agenda by remaining focused on the right product outcomes.

Fig 5: ( PM mindset & Attributes in building a true agile product life cycle)

In my next article, I will be discussing how to drive a fast-changing roadmap as an important living document and artefact for building a successful agile product life cycle.

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