The market environment is changing fast and customer expectations are increasing constantly. That’s why you need to be agile, i.e. able to move quickly and easily. The goal is to “Deliver most value with given resources at the earliest possible time at highest quality to your customer”. However, before you can deliver value, you need to figure out what will bring value (discovery).
Agile discovery is necessary
You don’t know what will bring value to your customers – you need to discover that first. Since you want to deliver value as soon as possible, you can’t afford spending months researching and creating a huge backlog of features. Even if the features are then built in an agile way that doesn’t make you fast in an end-to-end consideration.
In order to be able to respond to insights in a timely manner in a complex environment, your discovery approach must be lightweight and fast . You need to test and learn what works continuously and deliver based on your findings iteratively. That’s how you become fast in end-to-end value delivery.
Discover and deliver simultaneously
If separate teams work on discovery and delivery, a sequential element is inherent to the process and there is a need for a handover. To reduce the time from gaining a valuable insight to delivering value based on that learning, have a cross-functional team discover and deliver simultaneously. The shared understanding of the team members will ensure improved response times.
The success of simultaneous discovery and delivery depends on your team – plus-shaped people are key. For more on this topic, see It’s about people, not technology and Plus-shaped people close the gap between strategic and operational agility
