In the last post, we framed the situation and shared how to define a market.
Two challenges
The Rise of big "A" agile, and the agile industrial complex.
As agile grew in popularity, organizations need people to help them with their 'transformations'. Job growth, and the corresponding compensation/wage growth drove many people to obtain certifications. Certification companies churned out certifications and companies bought them. But were skills transferred to those agilistas? In most cases, no. They knew the words and what they meant. They were dogmatic and not pragmatic. Pragmatism often comes with experience.
Armies of newly minted agilistas went back to their company to transform them. They joined consulting firms who would then pitch companies and their transformation playbook. These playbooks filled with templates from certification, experience from engagements, and piecing together other toolsets to make their value proposition more different and valuable.
We are uncovering better ways of working became we uncovered the best way of working.
But what of the results?
The market has spoken about this which reflects many companies deprioritizing investments into agility.(Remember: the market is reality.)
Teams learned to sprint and estimate. They learned how to do standups and use Jira to show their transparency. They retroed to continue to learn, inspect and adapt while reading burn down and burn ups and discussing how many points they shipped. They added quality practices and deployed more frequently. A few paired and (even fewer) mobbed or practiced TDD.
They become more agile, but did they learn to respond to changes in the market and with their customers? Did they talk to customers or were they simply running through the backlog. ( Or were they swamped in 'stakeholder' requests/mandates?) Did they build an understanding of what problems their customers are struggling with, or did they iteratively build new things? Did they build relationships with sales, marketing and other operations leaders and work together on building a shared understanding of the customer their needs? Did they build a narrative about how their roadmap/work fits into the customer needs and supports the company strategy, or did they just create a few story maps? Did they measure the impact of their work through product analytics/telemetry and were these things discussed in retros? Did they take the time to learn from what they shipped, and the progress they've helped customers with?
Agility and product aren't mutually exclusive, or shouldn't be. Despite what agile coaches and service providers dogma, it's rare to be deep in both domains. Where to start?