How to evolve from DevOps to ProdOps
What good is DevOps without the right Product?
Products at the heart of Scrum
In Scrum, products are central to the framework’s success. The entire Scrum process is oriented around the creation and improvement of a product, with each sprint aimed at producing a potentially shippable product increment. This focus ensures that the development team continuously delivers value, allowing for frequent feedback and adaptation. The product backlog, a key artifact in Scrum, guides the team’s work, ensuring that each sprint contributes effectively towards the final product. This product-centric approach encourages a clear vision and aligns team efforts with customer needs and business objectives. A telling sign here is that the word product appears over 80 times in the Scrum Guide.
Why are we talking about DevOps?
The conversation around DevOps and ProdOps highlights a shift in focus within software development and operations. While DevOps emphasizes collaboration and efficiency in development and IT operations, ProdOps (Product Operations) extends this principle to encompass the entire product lifecycle, including design, development, deployment, and user experience. This shift is crucial as it centres on delivering and maintaining products that consistently meet user needs and market demands. ProdOps embodies a more holistic view, integrating all aspects of product creation and management, thereby ensuring a seamless, end-to-end process that aligns more closely with business goals and customer satisfaction.
Get Design out of the Ivory Tower.
When design thinking operates in linear, siloed environments, separate from the product development or operation process, it resembles the traditional waterfall model with its ‘big design upfront’ approach. This segregation can lead to inefficiencies and misalignments between design intent and the actual product experience. Design thinking in this isolated manner may not effectively incorporate ongoing feedback and adapt to changing user needs or market dynamics. This separation can hinder the iterative, responsive nature necessary in today’s fast-paced, user-centred product development landscape.
Job to be Done for JTBD
Clayton Christensen’s Jobs-to-be-Done theory significantly impacts product development by shifting the focus to understanding the specific tasks customers are trying to accomplish. However, its effectiveness hinges on the actual measurement of customer progress and outcomes. Without this real-world feedback and data, the theory runs the risk of remaining theoretical, failing to influence product development in a meaningful way. It’s crucial not just to identify the ‘jobs’ customers need to do but also to track and measure how well the products enable them to accomplish these tasks.
Exaptation, analysis and synthesis
Analysis and synthesis are distinct yet complementary processes in creating product concepts. Analysis involves breaking down a complicated problem into its individual elements to understand it better. This approach is methodical, focusing on examining each component in detail. On the other hand, synthesis is about combining these individual elements to form a cohesive whole. It’s a creative, integrative process where insights gathered from the analysis are pieced together to form new, innovative product concepts. While analysis is about understanding the parts and getting to the right granularity of information, synthesis is about envisioning how these parts can come together, often through exaptation, the reuse of a feature for a completely different function, in new, meaningful ways. Think microwave ovens originating from radar research or Viagra originally researched as a medication for hypertension and angina, demonstrating unintended discoveries can lead to innovative product applications. Both analysis and synthesis are critical for successful product development, with analysis providing the necessary understanding and synthesis fostering innovation. However, if we don't connect the two, valuable opportunities will most definitely be missed.
Connecting the dots.
Connecting the different ‘islands’ of product development, such as Design, UX, Marketing, Research, Development, and Operations, presents a significant challenge. Each area operates with its own set of processes, goals, and communication styles, making it difficult to achieve a seamless integration. This lack of cohesion can lead to ineffectiveness, misaligned objectives, and a disjointed product experience for the customer. Bridging these islands requires a concerted effort to establish cross-functional communication, align goals, and create an overarching strategic governance that prioritizes collaboration and integration. Without a closed ProdOps cycle, the full potential of a cohesive product development process cannot be realized.
