“We want you to be agile”. Great. My response to that was to whip out my stellar yoga “Tree” pose and say, “See, look how agile I am”.

Sadly, no one really wants to see my yoga poses at work; what we did want, however, was to re-build our legacy product platform, taking a Platform as a Service (PaaS) approach, deliver new features aimed at top-line growth, reduce OpEx, and significantly reduce our time to market for existing and new clients.

Also, it would be nice if we could take a lean/ minimum viable product (MVP) approach, and begin to change the culture of the organization along the way.

Now my Tree pose is sounding better, isn’t it?

Look, Agile has been around for quite a while, and there are lots of great reference materials to talk about the philosophy and the mechanics of executing Agile, and even how to embrace Large Scale Agile from the business or product side of an organization – one great book on that subject is by the guys at HP who used Agile to re-tool their core printer software.

However, as technology (software) becomes a larger and larger component of the products and services we consume, sitting closer to the “glass” our consumer customers interact with, as traditional product development and software development roles blend and blur, and as product lifecycles continue to shorten – the embrace of Agile across the business, product, and technology teams can be a differentiator between the product and companies that win vs. lose.

Here are the lessons we learned (aka mistakes we made) – from a business leader/product development mindset – in our first year of a longer journey to embrace Agile to transform our legacy, non-extensible product platforms into a transformative PaaS that could support the long-term needs of the business.

Use the smallest possible team you can. It needs to be a blend of business owners and software "doers", not managers. Whatever number you come up with is still probably 30% larger than it needs to be,
To make your small team work, make sure your team is 100% dedicated, with product/ business owners who actually know the product/ capability/ features they are responsible for,
To get the right people in place, be willing to look outside the traditional “product” organization – your true product owners may sit in operations, engineering, sales, etc.
Embrace this as an opportunity to improve your working relationship with the technology/ software development team by 10X – find the best folks and make them part of the Agile teams that you assemble,
Accept at the outset that you will get it wrong - # of teams, size of teams, operating model, etc. Get your initial set-up mostly right, work it hard, but don’t hesitate to adjust any of the variables until you get to a model that works for your organization,
Give them the ball. Once your small team is assembled and aligned to the product objectives & KPI’s, allow them to be accountable and make the right decisions; resist process or roles that exist to funnel the requirements or manage the message,
Build broad capabilities quickly, focusing on speed to market and product enablement – instill a bias toward getting things “right enough” vs. building full functionality; use your short development cycles to auto correct,
Where this represents a significant departure for the business, ensure that you have the right leadership support and communication plans in place.

Learning these lessons the hard way, the Agile mindset helped us to embrace and pilot MVP concepts on a large scale, break down barriers across product, technology and operations, and re-assess where some of our true product assets lived and blueprint a new approach for the business.

FOOTNOTES FOR THE PICKY: This is a very short overview of the approach we took, with very specific initial conditions and business goals – individual results may vary, but I hope this is helpful for those in similar circumstances. I did not mention results, but they were impressive – across many traditional measures of product development – but especially in the “softer” metrics around organizing for success and creating significantly stronger partnerships across the company.