Agile for the Masses: Bringing Agile to Your Extended teams by Dragana Boras and Claire Drumond
by Katsiaryna Drozhzha
If you still think that agile is only for development and product teams, think again. Non-technical teams including design and product marketing teams are increasingly adopting it. Why?
In this PRODUCTIZED talk, Dragana and Claire are explaining how your product and design teams can collaborate with their extended teams by sharing product feedback, evaluating feature specifications, and quickly collecting feedback all in one place.
Love Them or Lose Them
“We’re still human. And at the end of the day, all of us out there building software, are building it for humans. ”
The first touch with your customer experience is in the search engines’ results page (SERP), not just the signup form. In fact, statistics show that nowadays 93% of all online experiences start with the search engine. With this in mind, building successful SEO and content strategy becomes an essential part of the customer feedback loop.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a series of techniques and tactics used to increase the amount of visitors to a website by obtaining a high-ranking placement in search results page of a search engine (SERP)
That also means that you need to include marketing in your conversations about building your customer journey. Quite often, product managers are the only point of contact between the tech side and the business side of the product. They are a linchpin that brings the voice of the customer, the voice of the product’s business side. And in most cases, the conversation between product management and product marketing often ends up to happen too late.
So, how do you connect these two sides? And how to you bring the business and the voice of the customer to the in-product part of your journey?
The “Make” Triad
During the week-long workshop based on some exercises from the Atlassian Team Playbook (Rules of Engagement and Roles and Responsibilities), Atlassian team discovered that their triad needed some improvement.
The triad originally comes from the Agile Manifesto principle that “business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.”
“During waterfall software development, a single directive was set and then a project manager worked with developers to make sure that the work flowed downstream. In agile, continuous feedback from customers changes the kind of work that gets done. The triad was born as a response to this; where the PM (product manager), who has a constant pulse on the customer, works directly with the design and development leads, who are in charge of making the product. Our product development strategy is set by the traditional triad of product management, design, and development.” Claire Drumond
The Agile Manifesto has 4 principles that are really important:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
From there, several frameworks were built in order to allow product teams to develop using these principles in mind. Some of them include:
- Scrum
- Kanban
- XP-extreme programming
- Lean
- Scrumban/Kanplan
However, in the evolution of agile these frameworks became more a doctrine, witnessing the core of agile to change over time.
It’s All About Collaboration
As we have evolved, product managers have taken on a very large role. According to the research done by the Hire.com, among the key skills that a product manager has to have are data management, agile methodologies, product strategy, and business development. Which is totally fine. But is it realistic to ask the PMs to understand everything about marketing and everything about development? Probably not. That is why you need collaboration.
The Atlassian found out that the PM — DEV — Design triad didn’t really work well for them. As Claire Drumond comments in her Medium blog post:
We need to break down silos, open the lines for better communication across the team, while still keeping the core decision making group small. This will require that we think about the triad in terms of delivering value to our customers, not by job titles.
How do we go beyond this “Make” Triad, and can still keep marketing, design and management as the core product team and at the same time bring the entire extended team early enough in the development cycle?
The Essence of Three
It really does take three key things: transparency — everyone has access to get caught up on any project at any time; collaboration — shared workspace for all stakeholders to collaborate, share their ideas, and provide feedback; right set of tools — centralized tool set where all work is created, managed and stored.
At Atlassian, every team works with some form of agile methodology in mind: their Dev teams participate in daily stand ups, their PMs accomplish projects with Scrum, and their marketing and design teams plan and work on weekly sprints.
It is all about creating the whole notion of work visibility. Go beyond in-product, do more than just updating on-boarding, in-product message and refreshed documentation; reach out to your customer, send them an email and give them some heads-up of what’s to come; make it public, get the word out through blogs, social media and all other community channels.
This way of working together where marketing, product management, and technical riding team are all in action in a very agile manner, helped to launch a new Confluence (a team collaboration software) in a short time period with all updated documentation and messaging.The three components of desirability (do people want this?), feasibility (can we do this?)and viability (should we do this?) helped Atlassian to understand how the roles come in and out to make decisions. The idea is that it’s fluid: learn what each member of the team outside of your triad does, and bring them in early for collaboration, rather than a presentation.
Build Empathy
If you want to bring agile to your extended team, it should not necessarily be all about the frameworks, but can rather be about the culture of collaboration that you are building. Start early and remember that your customer experience starts all the way before the sign up form. Connect your business people with your engineering on a daily basis. Build empathy across your extended team, collaborate early.
Access Dragana’s and Claire’s PRODUCTIZED presentation below:
About Dragana Boras and Claire Drumond
Dragana is the Sr. Product Marketing Manager at Atlassian where she focuses on Confluence and spreading the word on how teams can collaborate and work together more efficiently, a topic she sees as the key to any organization’s long-term success. With previous experience working for a developer tools company, she is extremely passionate about agile methodologies and applying those to every aspect of the organization.
Claire Fisher Drumond is a product marketer and content strategist at Atlassian. She leads product content strategy for Jira Software and Bitbucket, along with Atlassian’s agile thought leadership efforts. Using design thinking, storytelling, and data analysis, Claire focuses on building better journey’s for customers and buyers, connecting the product experience to buyer intent.
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About the Author
Katsiaryna works at Productized as a content strategist. After spending some years traveling the world, she moved to Lisbon to discover the secrets of Western Europe. In her “free time” she enjoys surfing the waves of the Portuguese coast.
