Grab you agile hat, let’s wear it for a bit…
Continuing our agile post tags this time we’re thinking about product. What ever we developing in essence it’s core is a product.
Product management is a hotter topic than ever, I believe that moving from project-based thinking to product-based thinking is an essential part of delivering a successful digital transformation or let me re-phrase: delivering successfully. Full stop.
When describing enhancements and additions … etc, on a product I used to, for a while, stress the need to cover the 3 layers of a cake:
- Database
- Business Logic
- User Interface
Above, my masterpiece visual cake couple years ago @LondonsCalling (Agile Mindset, Scrum Framework & Agile Accelerator App)
Over time I have grown to believe, and understand, there are more dimensions of a product that we should all bear in mind, including when writing up user stories.
and these are the often called: 7 Product Dimensions
- User: Either people, systems, devices that interacts directly with the product, the core beneficiary of the effort put towards a particular piece of work.
- Interface: Representing the connections between the above, things like the visual interface, touch, voice, facial recognition… from human to computer; or things like APIs being from system to system.
- Action: The capabilities that a particular piece of work provides to the users, here story maps come quite handy.
- Data: From storing to using, from data needed by actions which is sent and received by product interfaces.
- Control: Accesses, policies, regulations, and business rules for the product to consider.
- Environment: Technology platforms and or physical attributes (depending which kind product may be, even salesforce related may be IoT?) Worth to keep in mind devices this will be used at, maybe you may want to limit browsers for best performance etc
- Quality Attribute: is the ‘bility’ family, things like availability, usability, testability…
All these dimensions to work through are not only at the product management / product owner level but of course as a Salesforce Admin, Adminloper and Developers keeping at heart value delivery over outputs.
Having that extra depth and wider understanding does help with prioritisation, therefore having a deeper knowledge of its impact from both value and effort.
Worth to mention that a product has to have a right balance, ideally something like below:
It’s normal that generally there is hunger for that blue 50% to take over and stretch the rest. To be fair, these are the most visible things once deployed to market. However, it is very important to stress the need for the colourful left hand side and being able to articulate why, again from product owner, Salesforce Admin, Adminloper and Developers.
Mind the product so it can be the healthiest it can be.