The Agile Product Manifesto Is Born

Defeating the Feature Factory

I’m tired of anti-patterns. It makes me mad when teams waste their energy on pointless things and fail to create REAL value sooner.

Many product teams are trapped and struggle to deliver value for end-users and businesses. Day in, day out, they miss opportunities to make the world better because they are too busy doing something else. Here are some ugly examples:

• Building solutions without knowing the problems behind it
• Working on multiple initiatives simultaneously because everything is important and urgent
• Creating features that business stakeholders love and end-users couldn’t care less about
• Implementing processes to increase predictability instead of figuring out how to reduce learning time
• Maintaining a gigantic Product Backlog instead of continuously inspecting and adapting
• Celebrating increased output as a success while the outcome is ignored
• Focus on mitigating risks instead of maximizing opportunities

Unfortunately, such situations happen more often than you imagine, and worse than that, teams generally feel powerless to change it. Still, top management may not perceive this scenario as a problem, but I do. 

Creating value requires different ingredients, and I believe product teams can defeat the anti-patterns with the proper guidance.

It’s time to beat the feature factory! You don’t need to fall victim of anti-patterns, you can overcome them!

Empowering Product Teams

Product teams should be empowered by leadership. I fully agree with this statement. However, there’s a problem; it’s passive, and teams should be active. Teams don’t need to wait for empowerment to create value; they should take the driver’s seat and do whatever is required to deliver meaningful impact.

Product teams will earn empowerment when they are ready to pick key fights and challenge the status quo. Action speaks louder than words.

Step by step, you can earn trust and ultimately become empowered. The journey may be long and daunting, but the results will be rewarding. The first step is to develop a value-driven mindset. Every action you take should contribute to generating value. Step after step, you will evolve into a value maximizer team instead of a feature factory.

You may wonder, “How do I cultivate a value-driven mindset? What’s that?” I’ve thought a lot about it, and I think we need clarity on key aspects of value-driven professionals. Once we know what is helpful and what’s not, we can choose easier where to invest our energy and passion. 

The Agile Product Manifesto

Last year, I challenged the relevance of the Agile Manifesto for Product Teams. I claimed it’s outdated and that we urgently need a Product Manifesto. I still defend this perspective. I think the Agile Manifesto did its work and contributed to a significant and essential change, but now our challenges are different. Teams need guidance on how to create value sooner.

Hoping to help teams overcome the awful traps they inevitably face, I formed a group of product professionals worldwide. Our goal was to develop a manifesto that could inspire product professionals to take action and change the world for the better. After many hours of passionate and engaging discussions, we crafted the Agile Product Manifesto for the community. 

Our intention is to provide clear guidance to teams on which values and principles they could follow to thrive.

We don’t claim to know the answers to all questions. We aren’t audacious to say this manifesto will solve all problems teams face, but we genuinely believe teams will have a better chance of succeeding when they live by the following:

Values

• Simplicity over perfection
• Pursuing goals over executing project plans
• Understanding the problem over thinking of solutions
• End-user needs over stakeholder opinions
• Measuring results over assuming impact

Principles

• Creating value for end-users and businesses is what defines success
• Frequently reorient to what creates value
• Embrace uncertainty. Be bold to ask for forgiveness instead of permission
• Saying NO unlocks focus to deliver valuable solutions
• Make assumptions and validate them as fast as possible
• The key to innovation is to take small risks enabling learning and evidence based evolution
• Measure business metrics and focus on improving them beyond monetary results
• Keep the Product Backlog clean. Backlog items age like milk, not like wine
• Craft a go-live strategy early and work backwards
• Know your customer and users! Every product has both
• Bond cross-functional teams around the product vision, where everyone is responsible for outcomes
• Product teams are empowered by top management

We want to learn from you. Please, share your experience with us and help the product world change for the better. We’d be glad to exchange with you and learn from your adventures. 

We invite you to share the Agile Product Manifesto with the community and connect with us. We believe that together we can win this battle and defeat the anti-patterns! Let’s make the product world better for everyone!

Massive thanks to all of you who passionately contributed to creating the Agile Product Manifesto, Alex Herweyer, Alexej Antropov, Åsa Nordin, Nurit Cohen, Pedro Alves, Peter Toth, Timm Eichstädt, Vira Chesnokova, Yolanda Prieto