Balancing Short and Long Term Value in Dual-Track Agile Product Development

As my co-worker, Vishal says:  “Dual-track Agile Product Development takes key steps in a serial process and runs them in parallel” 

This recognizes that Discovery and Delivery inform each other. They represent polarities to be balanced, not a tension to be resolved (Barry Johnson). Pursuing discovery as an ongoing activity while delivering enables product teams to realize the benefits of both without suffering the downside consequences of focusing on one at the expense of the other.

Creativity and Efficiency:

Discovery provides time for learning, creative problem solving, and experimentation. This reduces risk and ambiguity while improving alignment among the team and stakeholders. This enables a team to deliver with greater clarity and less waste. Incremental delivery provides assets fed back into the discovery process.

Risk and Reward:

Discovery is taking risks and testing new ideas that may or may not work. Delivery leverages established practices and patterns to make predictable and reliable progress. The team needs to mitigate risk in general but take calculated risks with potential for high reward. Again, delivery provides feedback that informs discovery.

Short-term value and Long-term value:

Delivery has a short term focus. Complete a set of objectives at high quality within a time constraint. Discovery has a longer term focus. How is our market or our customers changing? How do we validate that a feature creates the outcome we need? Ongoing attention to both time frames better delivers in the short term what creates value for the long term.

Business goals and Positive impact:

Discovery seeks to address user needs and considers impacts upon people. Delivery seeks to meet release dates with feature sets resulting in revenue growth. We want to achieve business goals — and satisfy users — and benefit people affected by what we build.

Dual-Track Agile Product Development:

This is why Dual-Track Agile proscribes an ongoing, time boxed commitment to discovery even when  delivering products. Teams avoid waste, reduce risk, and allow for adaptation and innovation. They achieve more business value and positive impact for the same investment.

I received assistance from ChatGPT to provide suggestions and generate content based on my prompts and inputs. I used this draft to organize my thoughts but used my own examples and experience to write the final draft.

#dualtrackagile #polaritythinking #productinnovation #businessoutcomes