Devolution of Whole Product Launch

One of the best practices I communicate in my client work is Whole Product Launch (WPL). I help companies define success by brainstorming on what it looks like, appears to be, customer satisfaction, etc. i.e. What needs to happen before customers get value not what needs to happen before we release the software.

However, I’ve noticed as companies embrace Agile this concept is difficult. The cross-functional team best practice in Waterfall is evolving to a product team that does delay stand-ups showing progress. However, many of the deliverables for WPL do not lend themselves to a daily stand-up. And many of the people in the cross-functional team are not really part of the new “product team”. Also, since some of these deliverables have long lead times they either devolve into lesser outcomes or are done “after” the release.

The result is poor or late sales enablement, customer training materials, press release, etc.

So how should one bring Whole Product through an Agile process? More on that next week…

Tags: agile, customers, whole product

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 at 12:04 am Labels: Product development, requirements management. Leave a response