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Who Moved my Product Value?

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28 Feb 2011CPOL4 min read 6K   1  
Who moved my product value?

At the outset, it seems like agile is all about short-term focus and a product life cycle is typically the polar opposite – it runs the total gamut in the spectrum that is the life of the product, starting from incubation to end-of-life. So, how does one attribute the relationship between the two? This is where product value comes in. Taking a philosophical question-and-answer approach to determining this intricate relationship, we can ask a very basic question: who are we building a product for? The answer is simple: customers. How do customers attribute the benefits derived from the use of a product that they pay for? Again, the answer is simple – it is notional value. This is the basic definition of product value. Over the years, this definition has evolved from its simple origins to a rapidly transforming lexicon that is built around product value. This is because the value or the definition of it has changed quite a bit in the past decade. The pressures of having to deliver to a competitive industry have grown exponentially within the last decade.

You Get What You Pay For!

Whilst this statement might be true for most products and commodities (with higher premium usually equated to better product standards), it makes for some interesting analogies in the technology space. Apparently, research shows that 45% of the features in a product never (ever) get used by the majority of its users. So, in the software industry of the 90s, the equivalent catchy phrase should have been:

You pay for what you never use!

Now, try selling that line to your sales guy, let alone your customer! Take a look at this for vindication:

Image 1

To the layman, it might not be seemingly apparent as to where this is all headed, or what this has got to do with Agile or Scrum. To the trained eye, it couldn’t be more obvious. If you take the added dimension of when Agile started becoming more pronounced as an accepted practice, it will dawn that it was not a mere coincidence for it to gain prominence in the last decade when this became much more of a ground force, or groundswell, from its origins as a "nice in theory" practice. Now, this has been the exact decade when the technology boom happened as well, with waterfall being the primary practice of delivering software and solutions. It doesn’t take a trivia genius to put two and two together to demonstrate that the value for customers diminished with waterfall because:

  1. Features were being developed with a target persona in mind that changed quicker than the product time-to-market window thereby rendering most of the features useless by the time it really got to the market.
  2. Rewards weren’t commensurate – there were promising technologies that fell by the wayside because they weren’t nimble enough to change courses midway through development.
  3. A product’s value wasn’t in the number of patents contained within, or the ingenuity of it all – make no mistake, that did indeed play a part – but, the biggest bottom line contribution came from how much value add it provided. This meant changing requirements all the time, and didn’t allow for 6 months of just perfecting a solution to a single problem. It became critical to be adept at maneuvering the product development through its rapidly changing life cycle.

Technology Adoption Curve

Image 2

The picture is fairly self-deciphering: the technology adoption is specified by the user persona in the various stages of the business life cycle: innovators setting the stage for early adopters, who demonstrate the viability for the early and late majority to cash in, followed by the late entrants who are adept at "making up for" the gross margins with volumes. The Product Life Cycle is demonstrated as well on the X-axis: with "finding niche" and "EOL decision" making up the two ends of the gamut, in the life of the product, over its living course.

To the mathematical readers, the concept of "increased frequency or reduced wingspan" of this bell curve will immediately convey the message of what’s happening in the market place today. To the less mathematically inclined, all that says is that the span of each phase in the product-lifecycle is shrinking, and rapidly. What was perfectly acceptable to deliver 18-months apart, is now "expected" to happen matter-of-fact in 9 months or less. This doesn’t mean that the workforce is doubled, nor is the complexity lesser now by any stretch of imagination. So, the only piece left to balance the equation is "adaptability" and to a slightly lesser extent, efficiency.

Conclusion

With adaptability driving the decision-making from the helm and change being the only literal constant – now more than ever – it points to only one way of delivering working software and value to customers. And that’s simply by being Agile, with tools like scrum to aid the process.

Source: QCon.

License

This article, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)


Written By
CEO Astrani Technology Solutions
United States United States
Kishore Babu Gaddam is a Senior Technology Consultant, Technology Evangelist turned Technology Entrepreneur and a regular speaker at national conferences, regional code camps and local user groups with over 14 years of experience in software product development. His experience includes building & managing award-winning software development teams, managing customer relationships, marketing and launching new software products & services. Kishore launched his technology career almost 15 years ago with a Robotics software development startup and has served in multiple roles since including developer, innovation leader, consultant, technology executive and business owner.

A technology specialist in C++, C#, XAML and Azure, he successfully published two applications to Windows store http://bit.ly/WinStoreApp and http://bit.ly/FlagsApp.

Kishore is the author of the popular Microsoft Technologies blog at http://www.kishore1021.wordpress.com/ and his work on Portable Class Library project in Visual Studio 2012– .NET 4.5 was featured on Channel 9 at http://bit.ly/msdnchannel9. Kishore enjoys helping people understand technical concepts that may initially seem complex and perform lot of Research & Development on emerging technologies to help solve some of the toughest customer issues. Kishore spends a lot of time teaching and mentoring developers to learn new technologies and to be better developers. He is a speaker at various code camps around Washington DC area, mainly at Microsoft Technology Center for NOVA code camp (http://bit.ly/novacc12), CMAP Code Camp Fall 2012 (http://bit.ly/novacc12), etc. The majority of his software development experience has centered on Microsoft technologies including MFC, COM, COM+, WCF, WPF, winRT, HTML5, RestAPI and SQL Server. You can follow Kishore on Twitter at www.twitter.com/kishore1021. He can be reached on email at researcherkishore@outlook.com

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