The journey of a product begins with a single step

This blog is about a product and a journey.

When Phileas Fogg set out from London to go around the world in 80 days he had no idea what adventures his journey would bring. It’s the same with any Agile product journey: you know where you want to go but you don’t know how you are going to get there until you start.

The difference between Phileas Fogg’s journey and an Agile journey is that Fogg’s focus was on the destination of his journey, and on in making it there in time. In his travels around the world he didn’t really make the effort to find out more about the countries he passed through or the cultures he encountered. Agile, in comparison, is never about the destination. It’s about the journey, and what you learn on the way.

As Phileas Fogg broke his journey across continents and oceans at various stages of his journey, so your product Agile Journey is broken down into six steps, generally known as the Agile Onion Plan. But you must remember that these steps are stages on a single journey, an adventure towards growth and transformation. Of course, the sequence of elements and the duration of each stage will vary from one product to another.

1 - Vision

Similar to our travelers, we set out on a voyage from the foggy alleys of London, or in our case an initially undefined product vision, to an exotic destination like the Indian subcontinent via a prioritised roadmap and finally, to the Wild West of release planning in a race against time.

When planning a product or a journey, you always start with a vision, your vision, the overarching goal you are aiming for and the reason you want to create your product. In Agile terms, that is your inception phase, often mistakenly called Iteration/Sprint zero. The average team spends a month in inception while the most iterations/sprints are usually two weeks long.

2 - Strategy

“Anything one man can imagine, other men can make real.”

If “men” can mean the men and women of an Agile project team, then our man Fogg was on the money.

Strategy here means how you achieve your goal and how that fits into your broader product strategy, and how you work with your team on the requirements for the execution of your product.

To maximise your chances of success, you start by looking at your target audience, key performance indicators, channels and dependencies so you can communicate what matters to the team and prevent them from getting lost in the details. Since your strategy is the roadmap to your vision, it is essential for your overarching vision to be aligned with the business strategy.

3 - Roadmap

At the start, you need to do just enough thinking to focus on the important features of your product, separating the “nice to have” features from the “must have”, to help you identify a minimum viable product (MVP), the critical core of what your customers actually want.

As Fogg said, “A minimum put to good use is enough for anything.” The MVP needs to be testable, which means you need to identify how you are going to measure the effectiveness of the new functionality you produce.

You need to plan how this translates into reality in terms of product functionality, user interaction, design and non-functional properties. And just like in the book, this could be done simply by getting the relevant people together in one room, like the members of the fogbound Explorers' Club who gathered at the Reform Club deliberating the odds of going around the world in 80 days. An Agile team will come together to brainstorm the business vision and the proposed technical solution. Except unlike in the Reform Club you should probably use a whiteboard and post-it notes instead of wagers and bravado. You’ll brainstorm into epic user stories and start creating your product backlog.

4 - Release planning

This around-the-world adventure rolls along, by horse, train, stagecoach, hot air balloon, ship and even an elephant in the movie version of the book. When one location runs out of gags, the travellers move on to the next amidst a whole lot of setbacks and unplanned adventures.

Your product roadmap should embody a similar spirit: it should tell a convincing and realistic story about the likely growth and transformation of your product. Each release should build on the previous, and move you a step closer to your vision by incorporating the feedback you collect as you go.

Release planning helps you prioritise iteration dates over goals, development approach, identifying constraints stories, theme/ feature set, team’s velocity and interdependencies. Planning resources and defining roles and responsibilities among your project team, agreeing processes to work together, for communications, governance and sign off.

5 - Iteration planning

Fogg and his companions face seemingly impossible obstacles to travel around the world at incredible speed, well, at a speed that was incredible for the 19th century. It was a time when airplanes were just a dream and space travel was thought impossible. They had to work together as a team, rationally and calmly, whether they were fighting Sioux indians or rushing to London from Liverpool in a specially hired train to meet their deadline.

The same spirit should animate your project team through every sprint. Iteration planning helps them gain a vision of what needs to be achieved and by when. It focuses the attention on your team’s capacity, on how to make decisions during planning, how to determine velocity, solutions and agree the definition of done, and how to prioritize the product backlog. It helps you find a balance between the integrated development, testing and deployment teams.

6 - Daily planning

Anyone who knows their Verne will know that a single delay may suffice to fatally compromise the chain of communication, but an opportunity that seems lost during the journey may present itself at the last moment. Should Fogg miss a steamer, even by an hour, waiting for the next could mean his efforts were for nothing.

This is why the whole Agile team meets everyday for a quick status update to coordinate and touch base so they don’t miss out on opportunities or face unnecessary delays. They share their understanding of the goals, coordinate efforts, highlight blockers and improvements and develop a strong sense of the overall relatedness of the product. These meetings are usually the time to update on:

1.  What I did yesterday?
   

2.  What will I do today?
   

3.  What is blocking me?
   

Sometimes you think you won’t make it in time, or at all. But you have to reach deep inside to find your inner Phileas Fogg and draw on your inner reserves of determination, resilience and let me call it coolness in the race to your own personal finish line. Fogg never gave up, no matter what the odds, and neither should you. The big difference between you and that crusty old Victorian explorer is that he did it to win a bet against his chums, while in an Agile team no one loses, and the focus isn’t on the destination, it’s about the journey, and what you learn on the way.