Agile Product Management: A Catalyst to Innovation and Adaptability
Rob Sanchez
The world of SaaS (Software as a Service) moves quickly and can change often depending on the industry. My industry focus, cannabis, has constantly changing regulatory requirements and stakeholder needs, demands, wants and crazy ideas. Companies can feel tossed around in the change if their product teams aren’t focusing on innovation and adaptability correctly. A great idea can quickly become a forgotten one and any variables that helped a business standout or get market share initially will quickly become commonplace without enhancement and continuous incremental improvement among other factors. This is the Product Manager’s role and responsibility: to innovate, adapt and foster an environment around the product that allows everyone to do so.
Who is responsible for Innovation and Adaptability?
So how can a Product Manager really drive these abstract things like innovation and adaptability? The PM is at the helm of the product taking into account the wishes of his captain, navigator, crew, country, allies and enemies. The entire company helps to provide feedback and perfect planned work, but the PM typically has that final say - not out of authority, but responsibility. This responsibility is to create a relevant, valuable product that both achieves business goals and customer needs while satisfying market pressures, regulatory requirements and various other forms of feedback.
That being said, leadership has to allow this responsibility to happen for everything to work right. A leadership team can stifle innovation and adaptability and stagnate culture faster than anything, but we’ll save that for a future article and assume the PM in this case has the support of their leadership and that leadership is relatively onboard with the whole idea of “Agile Product Management.”
How can Product Managers influence and own Innovation and Adaptability
Product Managers have to pay attention to everything. Of course, that’s the eternal resource allocation game of product management we all know and love, but here are four main contributors to Innovation and Adaptability for Product Managers and their companies to be successful.
Market Insight should always be taken into account when making product decisions and that insight can again come from anyone in and outside of the company but should be driven, understood and acted on primarily by the Product Manager or Product Owner for the team. This insight can be gathered anecdotally, from demos with prospects and good ol’ market analysis, while looking at your industry for trends and making sure to keep your product roadmap moving and shaking along with the market is key.
Customer Focus is an obvious one by the sound of it, but you’d be surprised by the way some SaaS companies work internally with the customer almost as an afterthought. Don’t do that! Instead, put your customer on center stage with the spotlight and let them be the stars. Products are only created and purchased to solve a job for a customer. These “jobs to be done” can differ from one problem space and industry to another. Without the customer’s buy-in on the product and its potential future, the product will plateau and inevitably fall by the wayside as customers “hire” other products to do the job for them.
The PM or PO helping with sprint planning should make sure to be the voice of the customer. To do that, they need to spend time with the customers regularly. This can be key to innovation and adaptability because the product team can learn about problems quickly and clearly understand the urgency.
The next piece of the puzzle here is Strategic Alignment. It’s on the Product Manager to understand the business goals and objectives overall. All of that goes into a funnel with the previously mentioned market feedback, customer focus and a few other ingredients to be distilled down into actionable improvements to their product. This could be small changes or whole new features and workflows, maybe even new target markets. Without this alignment and clarity from the top down in an organization, work will be wasted and culture will trend downwards.
The PM or PO in this situation should work to make sure and ask their leaders and other departments what’s needed. Hold meetings (if necessary!) to understand their current thoughts on the product past, present and future. Summarize this for your leadership and facilitate prioritization alongside their business goals. Easier said than done of course, but this is really a key piece of building an innovative and adaptable app as a product manager. If you see this is missing in your organization, it’s on you to start leading up the ladder to correct the course.
Agile Collaboration can be the elephant in the room or the fuel for innovative fires. The very nature of agile run with a scrum-like framework promotes and embraces innovation and adaptability. Building software in planned sprint increments is an iterative process with a constant focus on continuous improvement as a team and a product. Following a scrum-like framework will have your company aligned and communicating in ways they haven’t before solving new problems and building great things. It can eliminate side meetings and extra slack channels by bringing the right people together at the right times for a meeting with a purpose.
This cyclical process can drive a business to success if truly embraced by the organization. Every business is in a different stage of their agile development, and that’s okay. However, the PM/PO is responsible for acknowledging where the company is at and pushing the envelope to encourage a more agile mindset while building up the team and optimizing their processes. This takes organization-wide buy-in on Agile and a culture ready for the “team” vibes and culture of innovation and adaptability that come along with agile.
What happens when Innovation and Adaptability is lacking?
As you can imagine, when innovation and adaptability for product teams are lacking or missing entirely, things don’t look great. In my career so far, I’ve seen many companies suffer from this, some are still around while others have already walked into the sunset. We must consider market insight, customer focus, strategic alignment and agile collaboration as necessary to promote innovation and adaptability. It’s a sure bet that one or all of those are a problem in companies with problems innovating and adapting. The signs can be slow at first as a company wanders off the path for one reason or another.
This wandering and lack of clear results, progress and improvement creates stagnation. Nobody wants to deal with that on their product. It can be attributed to many different variables, but the results are the same; gradually outdated products selling less and less each quarter. This puts teams behind their competitors and continues to compound over time creating a competitive disadvantage.
Teams that lack adaptability especially will resist change and alternate or challenging viewpoints. They’ll cling to the known and the established for one reason or another and miss opportunities. It’s almost always the teams and companies that think they don’t need agile/scrum who really stand to benefit the most from the framework and processes.
At that point, you’ll start to see more and more customer dissatisfaction as the product isn’t meeting their needs and getting the “job” done. This will impact Monthly Recurring Revenue and prospect conversion through word of mouth. After this comes talent attrition; if intelligent people are unable to innovate and adapt in their work and the product is not successful, they’ll begin to find new opportunities and organizations that foster their creativity and professional growth.
What makes Product Management “Agile”?
Agile Product Management isn’t some rigid one size fits all framework, but there are elements that should remain unchanged to get the most out of it. The keys to keeping product management agile are to run the product/dev/design teams on two week sprints with iterative and incremental work. This allows pivoting in between sprints to solve new problems and handle changes in your industry, customers or business.
The continuous feedback loop agile/scrum processes create is an example of the cycle of innovation, where feedback and followup provide the insights to improve again and again. These small advances in the right direction build products people love, happy teams and wealthy businesses. It’s not something to overlook at all if your teams aren’t agile; it’s up to you as the PM to awaken your leadership to the potential.
How can a Product Manager or Team take steps to improve today?
1. Define clear objectives at the business, team and customer level to align the company and clear up any confusion or misunderstandings.
2. Introduce Agile and scrum processes with daily stand-ups, sprint planning and retros to keep teams on a path of improvement.
3. Create an open door environment where all team members can share their ideas and be heard to create the best possible products via transparency and collaboration.
4. Identify and prioritize small and achievable goals within each sprint to eliminate that feeling of a “death march” that can come with assembly line product/dev teams.
5. Seek out training yourself and provide info to the team on agile/scrum and its processes and benefits.
To succeed as a SaaS company, innovation and adaptability are critical. It comes down to Product Management to keep everything moving forward in the right direction to achieve business goals and fulfill customer needs. While there are many more factors to success and aspects of the product management process, these are two that should be kept front and center. Check out our little backlog of Agile and Product Management articles for more information and feel free to reach out with any questions. Apartment 113 offers Agile Product Management Coaching and Product Management services for software at any stage of growth and development with a speciality in the cannabis industry, ERP and integrations.