Haste without waste

Editor's note: Bill Murray is a startup mentor/innovation catalyst with American Family Insurance.

For as much talk as there is in marketing research circles about agile forms of research, there seems to be just as much uncertainty about what agile is – and isn’t. 

Help is here. I work with teams ranging from early-stage start-ups to corporate product development to do consumer research and product design. Agile is the way I help these teams accomplish more than they could ever imagine. Let’s take a walk together and examine a few misconceptions of agile and how the right frame of mind can create an environment of unprecedented value delivery.

Cutting through the agile buzz starts with understanding what agile is. It’s a mind-set, not a tool set. It’s a very intentional way of looking at the work at hand. Well-intentioned misperceptions of agile paint it as a path to working faster and getting more done, all in a two-week sprint. While there are kernels of truth in these ideas, in practice they will fail to deliver the intended value without the right mind-set – just as tactics fail to deliver business results in the absence of strategy.

Other misunderstandings linger as well. Agile is sometimes seen as lacking a “plan.” Agile “plans” focus on value delivery outcomes instead of specific outputs. As a result, leaders who are accountable for product outputs may resist agile work and its agnosticism of how that value is delivered. Without a clear road map to a static output, leaders are often uneasy about the ambiguity of agile work. 

Managers concerned about the lack of a plan can also become uncomfortable about losing control of the team’s work. This is, in fact, one of the advantages of agile work. Traditional management control of work often takes the form of directing teams to a specific output. Unfortunately, the manager is often too far from the customer to have the right perspective to be responsive to their needs. Agile teams give managers the opportunity to mentor their teams in a fundamentally different way, by supporting customer-centric work that drives real value, regardless of the ultimate form that the output takes.

A belief that agile is only effective in the software development space is the most common misconception. It’s true that agile started in the IT boom of the 1990s but savvy companies have used the mental discipline of agile to build value in areas other than IT for just as long, with great results.

One of those areas is market research. You may not currently think this way but I challenge you to consider the following: your market research work is a product. You heard me right. A product is “something that is manufactured for sale.” Market research easily fits that definition. Your team manufactures it and sells it to someone who uses it as a tool to drive some value proposition in their world. Your research fuels product design, marketing and even product retirement. With that in mind, when your internal customer approaches your team and says, “I need to understand X, so that I can achieve Y,” why wouldn’t you design and build your research product in a way that maximizes that customer outcome and at the same time minimizes the work required to build it?

Once you have answered the initial question of “Should I build this?” an agile mind-set asks, “How do I know that I’m working on something that my customer will value?” and then, “How do I build the right thing well?” Understanding where the two forms of waste occur in your design-and-build process will help you optimize your work. First, building the wrong thing is a tremendous waste of time and effort. It happens when there’s a disconnect between the definition of value between producer and consumer. Second, overbuilding the right thing is just as devastating. Like overshooting a target with a well-intentioned arrow aimed too high, your customer watches it fly by and is forced to waste time in retrieving it.

Why agile research pays big dividends

When we have a solid foundation in those agile mind-set questions, our tactics begin to take shape in support of that mind-set. Spending time in the “how” of our work pays big dividends in building the right thing, in the right amount, quickly. Three universal concepts drive the “how.”

The first is cadence; the pace at which we work. An agile team uses time-boxing to do several important things in one-to-two-week “sprints.” Sprinting doesn’t speed up the work, it focuses it. The sprint gives us a deadline to deliver something of value to our customer for feedback. In so doing, it forces us to build smaller outputs that still deliver enough value to get that customer feedback that will help define our next step. Sometimes the feedback helps us build more, sometimes it helps us to stop and build something else and, occasionally, the customer really surprises us and says, “This is great, I’ll take it from here!” Sprints force us to build smaller, more often, with radical customer involvement; and it solves for overbuilding and building the wrong thing.

Second is communication. The agile mind-set compels us to practice highly intentional communication with the outcome of ensuring the team’s work matches the customer’s outcomes of value and timing. Great agile teams are able to focus on speed-to-value by employing a sponsor, sometimes referred to as a product owner in agile circles. This person is usually in a leadership position, like a manager or director, and has upward leadership access to communicate on the team’s behalf, advocate for necessary resources and shield the team from unproductive distractions that can come from high places, keeping scope clearly defined. This helps the team concentrate on their customer and their customer’s outcomes, while keeping keen focus on maintaining the right fidelity of the solution they’re building. Great sponsors ask their teams lots of questions, both to help understand their needs and also to challenge the team to keep that focus on the most valuable work.

Commitment is the third way teams drive the “how.” Commitment is different from compromise or consensus. It’s the ability of the team to translate ambiguity into action instead of paralysis. While there may be different ideas of how to drive value within the team, the team can commit to a single direction to explore until customer feedback suggests otherwise. Teams great at commitment have more outputs, more often, for more customer feedback. In this production of more, these teams paradoxically complete their work using fewer resources. 

Supporting all three of these concepts are a few more commonly used tactics.

• Backlogs help identify potential future work to be done. The sponsor works with the team to establish the backlog and maintain its prioritization as the team ingests customer feedback. Backlog items are scrutinized for size and broken down to the smallest value chunks that can be completed in a single sprint for customer inspection. These small chunks become the work pulled into future sprints.
• Stand-ups or scrums are five-to-15-minute team huddles held two to five times per week that give team members a chance to share anything that might impact the team’s ability to deliver the value they’ve committed to for the current sprint. Not an update meeting but a forum to call out risks, identify barriers and request help or additional resources needed to keep the work moving.
• Demos are the formal feedback sessions where team and customer evaluate sprint work for value and appropriateness of fidelity. Instead of perfection, “good enough” is the target metric. Great teams are judged by the work they don’t do, just like jazz aficionados listen for the notes the musicians aren’t playing.
• Retrospectives or “retros” are the tool great teams use to look inwardly, to identify opportunities to work better. Being intentional about all of the “hows” helps teams own their processes and builds a culture of constant improvement. Sponsors contribute by helping hold teams to these new commitments and resourcing as needed to support new goals.

How to begin conducting agile research

Starting an agile journey can be difficult but begins with a single step. Permission can be that first step. Getting someone in a leadership role to give you room to experiment is key. Top-down thinking and antiquated ideas of failure can doom agile work before it begins, so get agreement on a short-term test with a low-risk project and a small team. Coach your benefactor to mentor your team as a sponsor and spend time reflecting on what the sponsor is observing. Challenge the sponsor to inquire more and advocate less. Measure team results when they are allowed to focus on customer outcomes.

Most importantly, get help. A scrum master in your company can be a place to start. Or reach out to me. I’m passionate about helping people live better lives through agile work. I won’t ask you for any money; helping others solve their agile problems helps me get better at what I do. You can find me on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/bill-murray-mentor. Starting with the right footing can help you get the traction you need to keep your agile transformation moving in the right direction.