Main Challenges of Product Practice with Ned Pope

Agile Coaches' Corner

This week, your host, Justin Thatil, welcomes Ned Pope, Director of Product Practice at Agile Thought. In this episode, Ned and Justin explore the most common challenges encountered while engaging with an enterprise client. Ned shares valuable insights regarding creating a new product effectively and timely, emphasizing the crucial value of openness and collaboration within a Team. Ned highlights the importance of focusing on the problem, the elements of the solution, and how they can be broken down to prioritize the most unique and highest value for clients and customers.

Key Takeaways

• Enterprise clients are dealing with a massive sector of the marketplace.

• There is a wide range of variance in what the clients are trying to accomplish, so it is important to ground them in their thinking around problem-solving. If you can remove even a minor inconvenience from someone's day, you add value to their life.

• There must be a list of priorities from executive and senior leadership within the enterprise clients, along with the dates they will be needed. This road map is not based on capacity or capability to deliver a solution around a specific item to be delivered at a particular time.

• Don’t get frustrated when trying to create a digital product. There is a reason this solution doesn’t exist yet, or in the form you are trying to build it.

• Make sure everyone is aligned and on the same page.

• Understand and respect the current processes within an Organization.

• The organization has already figured out how to solve the problem in the current fashion, and you do not want to disrupt that but to provide something that makes that process more manageable, enhances that solution, and makes it more effective and scalable.

• There are tangible elements that form a culture.

• Empower teams to think creatively about a solution.

• Openness, resourcefulness, and collaboration are critical elements of an Agile Team.

• Move UX design and UI library components as visual references at the beginning of the process to save time and ultimately allow for a better product.

• We often get to the details and the complexity of the work and then begin to get consumed with all the nuance and intricacy of the daily work, which can lead to overseeing the most basic aspects.

• Remember, you are building a visual tool!

• The vast majority of technology has some form of interface, which generates success and speed with quality and accuracy.

• Provide visual references to align the Team with what you are trying to accomplish and execute. It is recommended that you bring in a highly skilled UX Designer to the heart of the Product Discovery. Don’t wait until the process is in development; the UX designer needs to join the process from the beginning.

• Use a UI library.

Mentioned in this Episode:

Scaled Agile

Scrum.org

National Academy of Inventors

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