Rethink Your Understanding

Transforming Software Delivery

Delivering Value

Transforming Engineering: From Cost Center to Strategic Partner

by

7 min read

This article is the second in a three-part series exploring how software engineering can deliver measurable business value. If you missed the first article, start here.

A Leadership Epiphany

At the end of 2024, I reached a key moment in my career, reflecting on almost 30 years in technology leadership. In December, I published an article titled Crossroads: 2024 Reflections on Leadership, Legacy, and Modern Practices. The article explores my experiences with digital transformation, how leadership has evolved, and the changing role of technology in organizations.

The article covered key moments in my career, including my shift from improving engineering efficiency to focusing on delivering outcomes. It shared lessons I’ve learned about balancing workflow with value and the importance of aligning engineering efforts with organizational goals.

This article builds on those reflections, incorporating feedback and self-assessment to share the lessons I’ve learned and the changes I’ve made. It focuses on one key piece of feedback that changed how I approach leadership. My organization enrolled me and other senior leaders in a coaching program called The Extraordinary Leader. The program offered me a comprehensive 360-degree leadership assessment, which was both insightful and humbling. The results affirmed my commitment to a people-first leadership approach and my effort to develop my style. However, one piece of feedback stood out above the rest: “You should focus more on driving business results.”

At first, the feedback stung. We had spent years spearheading digital transformation initiatives—adopting Agile, DevOps, and Value Stream Management (VSM)—to improve operational efficiency, agility, and speed to market. These efforts enabled us to scale from $10 million to $110 million in revenue. Yet, it became clear that while our technology work was essential, we hadn’t effectively communicated its impact on the organization’s bottom line. My sales, marketing, and product peers had explicit metrics like revenue targets and customer growth, but engineering lacked a direct narrative linking its efforts to these outcomes.

We adopted Value Stream Management to bridge this gap and transitioned to a product operating model. VSM provided clear visibility into engineering workflows, from ideation to delivering measurable value, while the product operating model aligned teams with specific products or value streams. This shift empowered teams to understand the customer and business needs they support, iteratively improving outcomes over the product lifecycle. By focusing on products rather than temporary projects, teams developed subject matter expertise, drove innovation, and wholly owned their results, transforming engineering from a cost center into a strategic partner.

This realization led to a profound reflection on my leadership approach. While I had focused heavily on flow—ensuring work moved efficiently from idea to delivery—I hadn’t emphasized value realization: the tangible business impact of our efforts. This gap became a call to action: to redefine how technology aligns with and communicates its contribution to organizational success.

This Article at a Glance

Expanding on my earlier insights, this article explores:

  • Bridging the Gap: How feedback led me to revise our division’s mission, vision, and purpose to better align with business objectives.
  • Operational Efficiency vs. Value Realization: Balancing delivery speed with measurable outcomes is essential.
  • Embedding Outcomes Into Workflow: Practical steps for tying engineering work to organizational strategy and customer impact.
  • The Power of Language: Technology leaders must articulate the value of technical investments and technical debt in business-focused terms that align with priorities and resonate with key stakeholders.
  • A Call to Action: How technology teams can move from being seen as cost centers to strategic partners.

Engineering’s Philosophy: Code Is Not the Product

At the heart of our transformation lies a guiding philosophy: “Code is not the product. The value it brings is the product.”

This philosophy reshaped how we approach our work, from mission to execution. Our approach centers on two pillars:

  1. Flow: Improving the efficiency and quality of how work moves through teams and systems.
  2. Value Realization: Identifying and measuring the actual business and customer results of completed work.

Balancing these two pillars ensures that we deliver efficiently and create meaningful results.

Speaking the Language of Business

One of the greatest challenges for technology leaders is translating technical initiatives into terms the business understands. This communication requires reframing technical concepts—like reducing technical debt or implementing refactoring—regarding their impact on business outcomes. For example:

  • Instead of, “We need to address technical debt,” explain, “This initiative will reduce downtime risk and enable us to deliver features 30% faster.”
  • Rather than saying, “We’re optimizing the architecture,” highlight, “This change will scale our platform to support twice as many customers next year.”

Engineering becomes part of the strategic conversation by framing technical work regarding customer retention, revenue growth, or operational efficiency. By quantifying the return on investment (ROI) of addressing technical debt—such as projecting a 30% increase in delivery speed—we can demonstrate how these investments contribute to revenue growth and operational efficiency. This approach bridges the gap between technical efforts and business priorities, ensuring that engineering is seen as a strategic partner, not just a cost center.

Embedding Outcomes Into Engineering Work

Integrating expected outcomes into the team’s work and requiring every Epic to define a specific anticipated outcome helps bridge the divide between effort and impact. This approach ensures teams fully grasp the “why” behind their work and understand its alignment with organizational objectives. For each Epic, teams are encouraged to define the anticipated outcome and to consider key questions such as:

  • What problem are we solving?
  • What results do we expect, and how will we measure them?
  • What metrics define success?
  • How will we learn from the outcomes?

This clarity fosters accountability, focus, and a shift from delivering tasks to achieving meaningful results. By integrating Value Stream Management principles and the product operating model, we create a clear connection between technical initiatives and their business impact, aligning teams at every level.

OKRs further strengthen this alignment by linking engineering work to measurable outcomes. Team-level OKRs focus on delivering customer value while connecting day-to-day tasks to broader organizational goals. Embedding Outcomes in Epics and OKRs transforms engineering from a cost center to a strategic partner, demonstrating how every contribution drives customer impact and business success.

Every outcome or team-level OKR must have a clear owner—someone accountable for bringing the objective to the team, ensuring alignment, and seeing it through to completion. This owner, whether a Product Manager, technical lead, or another designated team member, is the point person for driving the initiative forward. They are responsible for defining the outcome and collaborating with the team to ensure it is achievable, measurable, and tied to organizational goals.

An accountable owner ensures that outcomes are not vague concepts but actionable goals with clear responsibility. This ownership fosters clarity, prevents ambiguity, and strengthens accountability within the team. For example, a Product Manager might own a customer-facing feature’s outcome, ensuring it improves user engagement by 15%, while a technical lead might own the outcome of reducing system downtime by 20%.

By assigning ownership, teams can better prioritize their efforts, align around shared goals, and deliver outcomes that matter. Ownership also reinforces the importance of closing the loop—documenting actual outcomes and reflecting on whether the objectives were achieved—ensuring a culture of accountability and continuous improvement.

Minimizing Layoffs and Rethinking Team Design

One of my long-term goals is to minimize layoffs as a cost-cutting measure by demonstrating the business value of engineering teams. Too often, layoffs are driven by salary costs, ignoring these teams’ contributions to revenue growth, customer retention, and operational efficiency.

Preventing layoffs begins with how we build and structure teams. Instead of defaulting to large, reactive hiring sprees, we can:

  1. Prioritize Outcomes Over Outputs: Build teams around clearly defined goals, ensuring their work aligns with business priorities.
  2. Right-Size Teams: Hire based on strategic needs, avoiding unnecessary headcount that creates inefficiencies.
  3. Focus on Sustainability: Scale deliberately, ensuring that teams are resilient, efficient, and aligned with organizational goals.

By calculating the cost of cross-functional teams and tying their contributions to measurable results, leaders can demonstrate the return on investment (ROI) of engineering investments. For instance, hiring two additional backend engineers and one data analyst might cost $X but could reduce customer onboarding time by 25%, leading to a 15% increase in customer retention—an outcome directly tied to the organization’s revenue growth.

A Commitment to Innovation

While this article focuses on aligning engineering with business outcomes, innovation remains a critical priority. Initiatives like “20% time” provide space for exploration and creativity, fostering long-term resilience and growth. Balancing immediate business needs with future-focused innovation is essential for staying competitive in a rapidly changing market.

A Call to Action

The feedback I received this year reminded me that technology leadership isn’t just about technical and operational excellence—it’s about driving measurable business results. Moving forward, I’m committed to linking technology investments to business results through:

  1. Embedding outcomes into every level of work, from Epics to team-level OKRs.
  2. Communicating engineering efforts regarding anticipated business outcomes and business impact using clear, relatable language.
  3. Balancing operational efficiency with value realization, ensuring every initiative contributes to organizational goals.

This journey is about more than improving delivery; it’s about ensuring that every line of Code, every feature, and every initiative creates value for customers and drives business success. By embracing this mindset, we can transform engineering from a cost center into a strategic partner, proving that our work is essential to organizational growth and resilience.

Next in the Series

In the final article of this series, we’ll move from leadership insights to practical guidance on escaping the ‘build trap’ and creating meaningful outcomes for your team. Read Now →

Poking Holes

I invite your perspective on my posts. What are your thoughts?.

Let’s talk: [email protected]

Profitable Engineering: Linking Software Engineering to Business Results

by

3 min read

From Code to Impact: A Leadership Series on Linking Software to Business Success

In late 2024, a 360-degree leadership assessment brought candid feedback from an executive peer outside the tech sphere that hit hard: “Focus more on driving business results.” After years of leading digital transformation—scaling our organization from $10 million to $110 million in revenue through changes in culture, team design, architecture, and modern practices like Agile, DevOps, and VSM—it became clear that we hadn’t effectively articulated how our technology initiatives contributed to the company’s bottom line. This series is my response—a thoughtful exploration of aligning engineering efforts with measurable outcomes and turning technology into a powerful engine for business success.

My goal is to change how organizations view technology investments by showing a clear connection between our work and business or customer outcomes. In this three-part series, I draw from 25 years of experience in software engineering and technology leadership, where I’ve often seen technology labeled as just a cost center. These articles aim to provide practical insights and strategies to shift this perspective, highlighting how technology can drive innovation, growth, and customer satisfaction. By adopting modern practices, a product-driven operating model, and data-driven insights, we can create engaged teams that act as business partners rather than cost centers, delivering value more effectively.

This series is for technology leaders, Product Managers, and anyone looking to align engineering with organizational goals. We’ll cover how to clearly show the value of technology, integrate outcomes into workflows, and connect technical work to business success.

This series offers a comprehensive guide to aligning software engineering with business success, balancing foundational concepts with leadership insights and practical steps for transformation. Each article can stand alone but builds on the others—starting with the basics of technology’s role in business, advancing to leadership strategies for driving outcomes and concluding with actionable steps to empower teams. The intentional overlap reinforces key ideas, while the progression delivers a cohesive, engaging narrative that equips readers to drive meaningful change.

Series Summaries

1. Engineering’s Business Value: From Black Box to Clarity

This foundational article addresses the challenge of linking engineering efforts to business outcomes. It introduces shifting to a product operating model and Value Stream Management (VSM) as frameworks to align technical work with strategic priorities. The emphasis is on defining clear, measurable outcomes to articulate the tangible value technology brings to the business.
Read More →

2. Transforming Engineering: From Cost Center to Strategic Partner

This article builds on the first article and delves into the evolution of engineering roles within organizations. It reflects on leadership experiences and the importance of balancing operational efficiency with value realization. The article discusses embedding outcomes into workflows and the necessity for technology leaders to communicate the value of technical investments in business terms.
Read More →

3. Breaking Free from the Build Trap: Delivering Meaningful Outcomes

The final article focuses on moving beyond a feature factory mindset by concentrating on outcomes rather than outputs. It highlights the pitfalls of the build trap and underscores the value of starting with outcomes, fostering accountability, and ensuring successful delivery. The piece challenges technology leaders and teams to adopt a mindset centered on meaningful outcomes that drive engagement and impactful business results.
Read More →

This series encourages you to rethink your approach and join me in this transformation journey. Feel free to share your thoughts, experiences, or perspectives. I’m always up for a great conversation!

Navigating the Digital Product Workflow Metrics Landscape: From DORA to Comprehensive Value Stream Management Platform Solutions

by

19 min read

Using engineering metrics can greatly improve your work. Which metrics can help you and your teams improve practices and increase your ability to deliver value to customers more quickly, efficiently, and accurately?

This article is designed to empower senior leaders like you to navigate the landscape of digital product delivery metrics platforms and tools. It offers insights into the various options available and the rationale for selecting one solution over another when determining the most suitable metrics platform.

In the rapidly evolving landscape of software engineering and digital product delivery, leaders are increasingly reevaluating their approaches to team performance, productivity, and metrics. These leaders are turning to quantitative and qualitative data to make delivery teams’ performance and efficiency improvement efforts more transparent. Teams seek data-driven insights to identify bottlenecks, uncover root causes, and evaluate potential enhancements. They aim to eliminate or refine these obstacles by experimenting with various changes to achieve greater efficiency.

Assessing software engineering performance remains one of the most significant challenges for organizations and corporate enterprises alike.

“Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.” – Charles Goodhart

“Goodhart’s Law tells us that ‘when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” – Marilyn Strathern

Embracing new metrics for today’s work environment is not immune to Goodhart’s law and the potential pitfalls of gamification. Therefore, both leaders and delivery teams must embrace these metrics and distinguish between business discussions and team conversations when analyzing and utilizing them.

However, having data insights and optimizing the performance of your delivery team is not just a necessity but a gateway to capturing performance insights, maintaining competitiveness, and enhancing processes, practices, automation, and team design to deliver value effectively.

As a senior leader with extensive experience guiding technology teams through digital transformation, I have witnessed firsthand the vital role of selecting the right metrics platform. During 2020 and 2021, I faced a similar challenge while assessing and implementing a metrics platform to gain insights into our digital transformation efforts, team structure, and automation investments. Leveraging my background, I quickly gained a deeper understanding of modern metrics.

At that time, a senior leader in our division, much like some of you, struggled to grasp the various metrics options and their relevance to our current delivery capabilities, often fixating on vendor pricing—a legitimate concern given our tight budget. This misunderstanding led to friction as we aimed to identify the best solution. While I acknowledged the advantages of different platforms, the leader’s emphasis on cost over functionality complicated our decision-making process.

After more than eight years of investing in our architecture, team design, automation, and delivery processes, we arrived at a critical decision point: Should we invest in a Software Engineering Intelligence (SEI) platform tailored for delivery, or should we pursue a comprehensive Value Stream Management (VSM) solution that encompasses the entire lifecycle from ideation to production? It’s important to note that the concept of an SEI platform didn’t even exist three years ago when we began our evaluation. At that time, we only had DORA and various vendors offering metrics platforms that needed more coverage across all stages, focused solely on parts of the delivery process, or had notable gaps in delivery insights, even among holistic solutions. I aimed to compare all vendor options, assess their coverage and focus, identify gaps across each workflow phase, and select the best fit.

We initially assessed ten vendors and ultimately narrowed our options to two: our preferred SEI solution and our top choice for the VSM platform. If budget constraints had not been an issue, I would have acquired both solutions to seamlessly bridge the gaps between them. I even lightheartedly suggested a potential merger for both vendors! We chose a VSMP solution based on where we assessed our bottlenecks and stage. This experience also inspired one of my early articles on the subject – Finally, Metrics That Help. Contact me if you’d like to explore my experiences, methodologies, discussions, and presentations related to this evolution in metrics.

Fast forward to 2024, and we discover the inspiration behind this article. I learned about a senior technology leader tasked with transforming and enhancing the large technology team he inherited upon joining an enterprise company. His primary objective is to turn the department around and to improve digital product delivery. He aims to reintegrate QA and product delivery responsibilities into teams—responsibilities removed during previous cost-cutting measures implemented by earlier stakeholders before he arrived in the organization. Based on my understanding, part of his strategy includes adopting delivery performance metrics to establish team metrics that will create a baseline for current performance, offer valuable insights, and initiate a pathway to enhancing overall performance and efficiency. He has focused explicitly on or selected DORA metrics to better understand product delivery roles and processes. Although I didn’t have the opportunity to discuss this with the leader before his decision, I am intrigued by how he arrived at the choice of DORA metrics. This presents a unique opportunity for us to learn and grow in our understanding of metrics. Given that this enterprise technology team has been delivering work effectively in an agile environment for years, I wonder if his decision truly addresses the more significant challenges faced by his division in improving the delivery process. Are these the appropriate metrics and feedback mechanisms to resolve workflow bottlenecks?

Stages of the Product Delivery Workflow

Once you understand the workflow, you can analyze and pinpoint its bottlenecks. This understanding allows you to implement metrics that offer valuable feedback and insights on these bottlenecks. This feedback is crucial as it helps you identify areas for improvement in an iterative manner.

The stages of the digital product workflow, often discussed in frameworks such as Value Stream Management (VSM) and Flow Engineering, typically follow the journey from an initial idea to the moment the product delivers value to the customer. Understanding these phases is essential for grasping how work flows within an organization and identifying where value is created.

The key stages or phases of the digital product workflow are:

  • Ideation (or Discovery)
  • Delivery
  • Operations
  • Support

Ideation (or Discovery): This phase focuses on generating, prioritizing, and refining ideas. It involves understanding what should be developed based on customer needs, market demands, and strategic objectives. This stage lays the groundwork for all future efforts and encompasses market research, gathering user feedback, and creating early design prototypes.

Delivery: Once an idea is validated, it transitions into the delivery phase, where actual development occurs. Delivery includes coding, testing, and deploying the product. This phase emphasizes transforming ideas into tangible products ready for customer delivery. It also encompasses the CI/CD pipeline, where DORA metrics are often utilized.

Operations: Once the product is delivered, it transitions into the operations phase. This stage is crucial in maintaining and managing the product within a live environment. Your work in performance monitoring, infrastructure management, and ensuring the product operates smoothly and efficiently is key to the product’s quality.

Support: The final stage is support, encompassing customer service, incident management, and ongoing enhancements based on user feedback. Your continuous efforts in this phase ensure that customers derive continued value from the product while effectively addressing any issues arising after deployment.

Value Stream Management resources, Product Flow, and Flow Engineering often highlight these stages. They offer a structured framework for understanding the workflow, guiding it from the initial idea to continuously delivering value to customers. These stages enable organizations to grasp how value is generated and delivered, facilitating more effective management of the entire product lifecycle.

Understanding the Types of Metrics Platforms

Before exploring specific tools, it’s essential to grasp the three main categories of qualitative metrics platforms focused on delivery performance insights as I understand them: DORA metrics, DX Core 4, Software Engineering Intelligence (SEI) platforms, and Value Stream Management (VSM), along with flow metrics.

DORA Metrics

“The bottleneck is Deployment.” Focus is on a very narrow slice of the overall work flow.

DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) metrics are designed to measure the effectiveness and efficiency of your software delivery process from code commit to deployment. These metrics include:

  • Change lead time
  • Deployment frequency
  • Change fail percentage (previously change failure rate)
  • Failed deployment recovery time (previously mean time to recovery or MTTR)

The information regarding throughput, stability, and metric definitions is sourced from the dora.dev website.1

Throughput

Throughput measures the velocity of changes that are being made. DORA assesses throughput using the following metrics:

  • Change lead time – This metric measures the time it takes for a code commit or change to be successfully deployed to production. It reflects the efficiency of your delivery pipeline.
  • Deployment frequency – This metric measures how often application changes are deployed to production. Higher deployment frequency indicates a more agile and responsive delivery process.

Stability

Stability measures the quality of the changes delivered and the team’s ability to repair failures. DORA assesses throughput using the following metrics:

  • Change fail percentage – This metric measures the percentage of deployments that cause failures in production, requiring hotfixes or rollbacks. A lower change failure rate indicates a more reliable delivery process.
  • Failed deployment recovery time – This metric measures the time it takes to recover from a failed deployment. A lower recovery time indicates a more resilient and responsive system.

Why Choose DORA?

Budget concerns. The bottleneck is deployment (release) and stability.

  • Focused on Deployment Efficiency: DORA metrics are ideal for organizations that need to optimize their CI/CD pipeline and improve deployment frequency and stability.
  • Narrow Scope, High Impact: DORA metrics can provide precise insights to drive improvements if your primary bottlenecks relate to deployment.

DX Core 4 Metrics

“The bottleneck is primarily deployment” and insights into team engagement.

The DX Core 4 is a new entrant in the metrics landscape for 2023 and 2024. This comprehensive framework aims to measure and enhance productivity among developers and delivery teams by focusing on four essential dimensions: speed, effectiveness, quality, and business impact. Designed to integrate insights from established frameworks such as DORA, SPACE, and DevEx, it provides organizations with actionable insights that bridge the gap from frontline teams to executive leadership.2 Similar to DORA, this framework emphasizes the Delivery phase of Flow.

Here are the four dimensions of the DX Core 4 framework:

Speed: Measures how quickly software is developed and delivered, from inception to production.

Key Metrics:

  • Cycle Time: How long a task or feature takes to move through the development pipeline.
  • Lead Time for Changes: Similar to DORA, this measures the time from code commit to production.

Effectiveness: Assess how well development processes achieve their intended outcomes.

Key Metrics:

  • Workflow Efficiency: How efficiently teams move work through different stages.
  • Goal Completion: The ability of the team to meet sprint or project objectives.

Quality: Evaluate the quality of the software being produced.

Key Metrics:

  • Defect Rate: The number of defects or issues found during or after deployment.
  • Code Quality: Measured by the percentage of code needing rework or post-deployment fixes.
  • User Satisfaction: User feedback, often through surveys or Net Promoter Scores (NPS).

Business Impact: Measures how well software development efforts align with and support overall business objectives.

Key Metrics:

  • Feature Adoption: Tracks how customers adopt new features.
  • Revenue Impact: How specific development activities contribute to business revenue or growth.
  • Alignment with Business Goals: Measures the percentage of development work directly contributing to strategic business objectives.

These four dimensions provide a balanced view of development performance, ensuring that teams deliver quickly and produce high-quality work that drives business outcomes. The DX Core 4 framework integrates well with other methodologies like DORA, SPACE, and DevEx, offering a holistic picture (quantitative and qualitative) of productivity.

Why Choose DX Core 4?

The bottleneck or focus is on Delivery performance and Team Sentiment.

Consider DX Core 4 if you aim to accelerate delivery while ensuring that your software meets high-quality standards and aligns with business objectives. This framework enables you to focus on both the technical and business dimensions of software development, providing a balanced approach to enhancing developer productivity in the organization.

Software Engineering Intelligence (SEI) Platforms

“Our bottleneck is Delivery.” Focus is on the Delivery stage.

In recent years, Software Engineering Intelligence (SEI) platforms have emerged as a distinct category, extending beyond traditional DORA metrics primarily focusing on the CI/CD pipeline. Additionally, some analysts, such as McKinsey and solution providers, refer to these as Engineering Management Platforms (EMPs). For the purpose of this post, I will refer to them as SEI platforms.

SEI platforms cover the entire delivery process, from when a work item enters the backlog to its deployment, incorporating metrics like cycle time, throughput, work-in-progress (WIP), and quality indicators such as pull request size and rework rates. These platforms excel by integrating various tools (e.g., Git, CI/CD, project management) to offer a unified view of the entire delivery pipeline.

Some SEI platforms focus on actionable insights and benchmarking, often utilizing data to compare team performance against industry standards. More importantly, these SEI solutions align engineering efforts with broader business objectives, a crucial aspect that traditional DORA metrics often overlook but is of strategic value to any organization.

Some SEI platforms also provide a comprehensive view of the development process, including visibility in developer experience (DX) by tracking productivity and team health, using metrics like WIP and burnout alerts. This holistic view makes them ideal for organizations looking to optimize workflows beyond just CI/CD, instilling confidence in the thoroughness of the approach.

While DORA metrics provide critical insights into deployment efficiency, SEI platforms offer a more comprehensive approach, ideal for organizations seeking to optimize the full delivery pipeline and align with business goals.

Gartner has recently published a market guide on SEI platforms for those interested in exploring this further3.

Here are some key types of metrics commonly found in some of the more known SEI platforms :

  • Cycle Time: Measures the time it takes for a work item to move from the backlog to deployment. This metric helps identify inefficiencies in the development process and highlights areas where delays occur.
  • Throughput: This metric tracks the number of work items completed over a specific period. It provides insight into team productivity and helps assess whether teams meet their delivery goals.
  • Work in Progress (WIP): Monitors the number of items being worked on or in progress. High WIP can indicate bottlenecks or overloading of the team, which can slow overall delivery.
  • Pull Request (PR) Size and Rework Rate: Evaluate the size of pull requests and the frequency of rework required. Smaller PRs with lower rework rates tend to be merged faster and with fewer issues, contributing to smoother deployments.
  • Planning Accuracy: This compares planned versus actual delivery timelines. It helps teams understand how well they estimate their work and whether they consistently meet their commitments.
  • Developer Experience (DX): SEI platforms often include metrics that assess developer satisfaction and efficiency, such as time spent in meetings versus coding and the overall impact of tools and processes on developer productivity.

Why Choose SEI?

Your bottleneck remains in the workflow’s delivery phase, but you have the budget for an SEI solution and need insights beyond code commit to delivery.

  • Optimizing Planning, Development, Deployment, and Stability: SEI platforms are perfect for teams looking to streamline the development and delivery process from backlog to production, balancing speed with quality and introducing team health insights.
  • Broader Than DORA, Narrower Than VSM: SEI platforms offer a middle ground, providing insights into the development process without tracking the entire lifecycle.

Value Stream Management (VSM) Platforms and Flow Metrics

“The bottleneck is upstream.” Insights cover the entire Value Stream (work flow).

Value Stream Management Platforms (VSMP) optimizes the entire digital product lifecycle, from ideation to operation and support. It enables organizations to visualize, measure, and enhance the flow of value across complex systems, identifying inefficiencies and aligning technical and business objectives. Companies ready to adopt VSM typically have mature delivery practices and aim to improve collaboration across teams. VSM platforms provide insights into bottlenecks, work-in-progress limits, and metrics that help organizations assess ROI and align their efforts with business goals, ultimately enhancing predictability and efficiency in software delivery.

Enterprises and companies that have embraced agile and DevOps practices and seek to bridge the divide between business and technology will find these platforms especially beneficial for enhancing predictability, speeding up discovery and delivery, and achieving alignment with business goals across the organization. Like various SEI platform solutions, many top VSM platforms provide valuable insights into team health and metrics associated with developer and team experiences.

Here are some key business metrics commonly found in top VSM platforms today:

  • Flow Velocity: This metric tracks the number of flow items—such as features, defects, risks, and debts—completed within a defined time frame. It provides valuable insight into the amount of value being delivered.
  • Flow Efficiency: The ratio of active time to the total time a flow item spends in the value stream serves as a key metric for assessing the efficiency of work processing.
  • Flow Time: The total duration for a flow item to progress from ideation to completion is a vital metric for assessing time-to-market.
  • Flow Load: Tracks the number of flow items currently in progress. A high volume may signal potential bottlenecks or team overloads.
  • Flow Distribution: Tracks the balance among various types of work—features, defects, risks, and technical debt. This metric ensures that all efforts align with strategic priorities.
  • Cost of Delay: This approach assesses the financial consequences of postponing the delivery of features or projects, enabling organizations to prioritize tasks based on the potential business value lost due to these delays. By quantifying the cost of delay, companies can make informed decisions about which features to prioritize, ultimately maximizing their return on investment (ROI).
  • Value Stream ROI: This metric evaluates the return on investment for various value streams by comparing development costs with the business value generated from delivered features. It enables businesses to assess the financial effectiveness of their development processes, allowing them to adjust resources or priorities to optimize returns.

Why Choose VSM?

  • Holistic View of the Value Stream: VSM tools offer comprehensive visibility, insights, and feedback across the entire digital product workflow. They assist in optimizing each stage, from idea generation to production.
  • Alignment with Strategic Goals: These platforms help ensure that all phases of your software lifecycle are efficient and aligned with your business objectives.

Choosing a Platform

Selecting the appropriate metrics platform requires careful consideration of several factors, such as your budget, the locations of bottlenecks in your product workflow, the specific challenges you seek to resolve, the maturity or efficiencies of your current processes, and the readiness and awareness of your leadership team across the stages.

Identify Your Bottlenecks

  • Deployment Challenges: DORA metrics might be the ideal solution if you are on a tight budget and experience delays mainly after commits, characterized by lengthy lead times or frequent deployment failures. DORA-based tools and surveys can provide the insights necessary to enhance your CI/CD pipeline.
  • Development and Delivery Challenges: If inefficiencies arise during the development phase—such as extended cycle times or excessive work-in-progress—SEI platforms can help you identify and effectively address these challenges. Additionally, if you encounter deployment bottlenecks, including issues from code commit to deployment, while also having a favorable budget, leveraging an SEI platform can offer significant advantages over DORA.
  • Systemic Issues Across the Lifecycle: For organizations facing extensive inefficiencies from ideation to production, VSM platforms offer a comprehensive solution. These platforms adeptly identify and eliminate bottlenecks throughout the value stream, although they may also represent a significant budget investment.

Why Not Start with a Broad Scope VSM Solution?

While starting with a comprehensive Value Stream Mapping (VSM) solution for complete visibility across your value stream may appear logical, strategically targeting specific issues — namely, bottlenecks — can offer significant advantages. The rationale is straightforward: optimizing processes downstream of a bottleneck often leads to underutilization, while enhancing upstream operations without addressing the bottleneck can result in a backlog at that critical choke point. 

You can start by identifying and optimizing the bottleneck in your process. DORA metrics and SEI platforms can be considered for diagnosing CI/CD pipeline issues and delivery phase improvements. After resolving these challenges, you can broaden your focus using SEI or VSM platforms to optimize the broader scope of your value stream or product workflow. This comprehensive approach guarantees that your improvements yield significant and sustainable enhancements in overall efficiency.

Additionally, it is essential to consider various factors, such as the organization’s size, budget constraints associated with different solutions, the readiness of divisional leadership, and the overall comprehension of digital product delivery practices — not just within product and technology teams but across the entire organization.

When to Consider a Broader Scope Platform

Organizations that have invested in and optimized their delivery processes—by establishing highly automated CI/CD pipelines, minimizing waste, and reducing wait times between stages—are ideally positioned to embrace broader-scope platforms, provided they have the budget to support these tools. Here’s why:

  • Emphasize the Early and Late Stages: After optimizing delivery, the subsequent focus should be on refining the ideation, operational, and support phases. Comprehensive platforms ensure that only the most valuable ideas progress, operations run efficiently, and support remains proactive and effective.
  • Comprehensive Optimization: Platforms with a broader scope, such as VSM tools, offer the visibility required to optimize the entire lifecycle. This ensures that every stage—from ideation to support—remains aligned and efficient.
  • Maximizing ROI: These platforms enhance your return on investment by tackling inefficiencies upstream and downstream of delivery, optimizing your existing investments in CI/CD and delivery processes.

Team Sentiment

Team Sentiment: Incorporating team health and sentiment qualitative metrics into your metrics solutions or selections is crucial. Metrics like Developer Experience (DX) and Team Experience (TX) should prioritize team sentiment and well-being, highlighting their importance in fostering a positive work environment. Team health metrics complement the quantitative data from delivery metrics, creating a comprehensive view of software efficiency alongside team health. This combination ensures you optimize processes and nurture a motivated and effective team. While this topic could warrant a follow-up article, or you can read some of my related articles on adopting metrics, it’s essential to integrate qualitative and quantitative feedback into your overall strategy.


Summary

Whether your goal is to refine your CI/CD pipeline using DORA metrics, improve your development process with SEI platforms, or achieve comprehensive visibility with VSM tools, aligning your choice with your strategic objectives is essential. This post highlights the numerous options and solutions available when considering implementing a metrics platform.

By thoughtfully selecting an appropriate platform and pairing it with team health indicators, you can drive continuous improvement, enhance efficiency, and deliver exceptional value to your customers and business. Selecting the appropriate metrics platform for your software delivery process is a vital decision influenced by your organization’s size, specific requirements, and maturity level. Ultimately, it can come down to your organization’s context, budget, and leadership mindset.  

A combination of solutions or tools serves you best, as they can complement one another by filling the gaps left by individual platforms. This holds when finding a solution that offers quantitative performance and qualitative team health and engagement.

From my experience in guiding technology teams through digital transformation and my recent in-depth market evaluation and platform adoption, I’ve learned that readiness is paramount. While the appeal of a more extensive platform can be strong, it’s vital to ensure that your leadership and organizational mindset are prepared for the journey ahead. Without this alignment, even the most advanced metrics platform may fall short of its potential. Therefore, before making the leap, confirm that your team is on board and your organization is ready for the change. Know your constraints, list your anticipated results, and what you want to achieve. Then, pick a solution or combination to help you achieve your expected outcomes.

Options in the Market

I’ve conducted thorough research to choose the best solution for our specific context and have my preferred partners. Additionally, we spent a year exploring the build-versus-buy option, beginning our journey with an in-house solution. If you want to learn more about my experiences, please reach out.

Disclaimer: In this article, I will not endorse any specific vendor. I will provide a foundational understanding based on insights from various vendors and their websites. I do not claim that these mentions represent the only options available in the market or that they accurately capture the purpose of each vendor within their respective categories. Additionally, I need more insight to assess which platform might be superior, as I need to familiarize myself with your organization’s specific context. My aim is simply to give you a head start in your research.

DORA

Several platforms on the market leverage DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) metrics to evaluate software delivery performance. These platforms emphasize key DORA metrics, including deployment frequency, lead time for changes, mean time to restore (MTTR), and change failure rate. Below are some noteworthy platforms and vendor solutions:

DX Core 4

As the market’s newest framework, few platforms integrate the DX Core 4 metrics into their offerings to help organizations track developer productivity and experience across speed, effectiveness, quality, and business impact. The DX Platform is a primary example, designed by leading researchers behind DORA and SPACE, specifically created to measure developer experience and productivity through qualitative and quantitative insights.

Here are some notable platforms that utilize the DX Core 4 metrics:

  • DX Platform: The DX Platform was specifically designed to measure and improve developer productivity through the DX Core 4 framework.

Alternatives to consider that may not directly incorporate DX Core 4 metrics yet provide comparable insights include:

  • LinearB: Although LinearB does not explicitly use the DX Core 4 framework, it tracks several metrics aligned with speed, effectiveness, and quality, similar to the DX Core 4 dimensions.
  • Pluralsight Flow (formerly GitPrime): aligns with some DX Core 4 dimensions, especially in speed and quality.
  • GitLab: aligns with some of the core tenets of the DX Core 4 framework.

Software Engineering Intelligence (SEI) Platforms

Several platforms explicitly position themselves as Software Engineering Intelligence (SEI) platforms, offering metrics to help organizations optimize software delivery, developer productivity, and business alignment. These platforms go beyond traditional CI/CD metrics and provide deeper insights into development workflows, team efficiency, and alignment with business goals. Here are some leading SEI platforms available today:

Value Stream Management Platforms

Numerous platforms actively position themselves as Value Stream Management (VSM) solutions, offering metrics that track the flow of value throughout an organization’s discovery and development lifecycles. These platforms enable organizations to align software delivery with business objectives, streamline workflows, and reduce inefficiencies within the value stream. VSM platforms are particularly beneficial for enterprises requiring comprehensive governance and oversight in complex release management scenarios. Below, we highlight some of the leading VSM platforms currently available on the market:

Update: September 18, 2024 – Following the publication of this article, Planview has announced its acquisition of Plutora. Press Release.

This article aimed to help senior leaders or other product and technology managers navigate the landscape of performance metrics platforms and tools to measure the performance and engagement of software delivery teams. I hope this post offers valuable insights if you are contemplating the adoption of a metrics platform.

References

  1. DORA, https://dora.dev/guides/dora-metrics-four-keys/
  2. DX Core 4, https://getdx.com/research/measuring-developer-productivity-with-the-dx-core-4/
  3. Software Engineering Intelligence Platforms Reviews and Ratings, https://www.gartner.com/reviews/market/software-engineering-intelligence-platforms, Garnter.com

Related Posts

Poking Holes

I invite your perspective on my posts. What are your thoughts?.

Let’s talk: [email protected]

Evolving the Agile Leadership Role: Integrating Value Stream Management into Agile Leadership

by

9 min read

This post is part of my ongoing series showcasing the competitive edge provided by maintaining Scrum Master or Agile Leader roles within teams. If you’d like to read more, please review the related posts section at the end of this article.

Value Stream Management

Value Stream Management doesn’t require you to transform your software delivery practices beforehand or adopt Agile, Lean, or DevOps practices first. It provides visibility into how you ideate, plan, create, and deliver digital products or services. It optimizes the time spent on these tasks by automating and standardizing the workflow from ideation to production and operation. Based on the insights, you can discuss, decide, and experiment with frameworks and practices to improve your system and workflow. I discovered Value Stream Management in late 2020 and introduced it to my department in 2021, after more than six years into our digital evolution. VSM is a natural complement to our Agile, Lean, and DevOps initiatives.

Like Agile, DevOps, and Lean practices, Value Stream Management (VSM) demands organizational understanding, alignment, and expertise. Successful adoption of VSM requires everyone to understand its purpose, benefits, and implementation. Subject matter experts play a crucial role in this process. Introducing dedicated VSM roles—such as Value Stream Managers, Value Stream Architects, and Flow Advisors—is essential for ensuring continuous value delivery and operational efficiency.

Expertise can be sourced externally, identified within the organization, or cultivated through strategic investment. Unlike the early attempts to transition teams from waterfall to agile by merely rebranding Project Managers or Business Analysts as Product Managers or Product Owners, these new roles are distinct and require dedicated training and development. Investing in this development is essential for success.

These new roles can be added to the organization, departments, or current members of cross-functional delivery teams. This article supports the cross-functional team option, recommending that Agile Leaders in cross-functional teams are a great option and can be trained as their teams’ VSM and Flow experts. We are testing the idea of developing VSM skills and expanding the responsibilities of Agile Leaders or Scrum Masters within our cross-functional delivery teams.

The Conversation

A VSM colleague, Patrice Corbard, shared an insightful observation based on published results about Scrum Master maturity in a community Slack message. While I am still determining the research methods used or the accuracy of the research findings representation of the industry, the discussion it sparked was quite interesting. Patrice highlighted that only 8% of Scrum Masters can optimize product value streams. He posed three questions:

  1. Are you surprised by this very low proportion?
  2. What are the benefits of the value streams approach to get scrum masters interested in the subject, particularly in these difficult times when agile coaching roles are being called into question?
  3. What do you suggest to change the game and motivate scrum masters and their leaders/managers?

This inspired me to share how, I have been enhancing the Scrum Master/Agile Leader role by integrating VSM knowledge, experience, and responsibilities.

From the ScrumMatch website: 

Scrum maturity reflects the capability to leverage Scrum to deliver increased business value more efficiently. ScrumMatch evaluates the Scrum maturity of both Scrum Masters and organizations, providing transparency so each can understand how well they align with each other’s needs and expectations. A Scrum Master’s maturity level is displayed on their profile, rated on a 7-point scale from low to high maturity. 1, 2

Here is my summary of their findings. The top three points on the current state of Scrum Master maturity are:

  • Substantial Proportion Lack True Scrum Mastery: 38% of candidates fail to exhibit the essential qualities of a proficient Scrum Master.
  • Most Candidates Are Still Developing Foundational and Applied Skills: 37% of candidates are at the intermediate level, with 10% possessing foundational knowledge, 13% understanding and applying Scrum principles, and 14% starting to enhance their Scrum practices.
  • Limited Advancement to High Organizational Impact: A small percentage achieve higher maturity levels. Specifically, 14% utilize Scrum to enhance product development, 8% focus on optimizing the product value stream, and only 3% can optimize the entire organization.

First Question

“Are you surprised by this very low proportion?”

These findings don’t surprise me; they align with my experiences. Similar to the Product Owner role, The Scrum Master or Agile Leader team role is crucial. Enhancing its value and bringing it to maturity requires continuous investment in learning and hands-on experience. This dedication is essential for adding value to the team.

I attribute the questioning of the value and maturity level of Scrum Masters to several key factors: the commercialization of certifications (ease of access and proliferation of certification mills), the expertise and mindset of senior leadership or executive sponsors (entrenched or outdated perspectives), investment in continuous training, and hands-on practical experience.

Like other team roles, new Scrum Masters and Agile Leaders need time to develop their skills and gain experience. This should be complemented by continuous investment in learning and growth.

Second Question

“What are the benefits of the value streams approach to get scrum masters interested in the subject, particularly in these difficult times when agile coaching roles are being called into question?”

Starting with the second part of Patrice’s second question, which points to the industry debate on Agile and the value of the Scrum Master/Agile Leadership role, this topic commands a separate discussion beyond the scope of this article, and I will be brief. 

Many agile or digital transformation struggles and failures can be traced to leadership, prevailing mindsets, and experiences. However, I agree that the role of the Scrum Master has been diluted by the proliferation of accelerated certifications and the commercial aspects surrounding them. This trend has undermined the significance of the Scrum Master’s responsibilities and their potential to make a meaningful impact on cross-functional software delivery teams. 

Do we need the Scrum Master/Agile Leader role?

Your organization and team design will decide.

First-time product owners need time, trust, and support to grow into their new role. – Roman Pichler

This quote applies to Scrum Masters, Agile Leaders, and Product Owners or Product Managers. These roles add value as they gain knowledge and experience and improve their skills and trust in their teams.

My responsibilities include team design, systems thinking, and delivering high-quality technology quickly. Although I have extensive experience in agile delivery, I am not a Scrum Master and have never held that role. However, I have led and mentored our agile leadership team and am a strong advocate for its value within cross-functional delivery teams.

Conversely, as we progress through decades of digital transformation and move away from traditional waterfall methods, the benefits of Agile practices and the role of Scrum Masters are increasingly debated. Many organizations still struggle with Agile transformations, often concluding that Agile falls short, leading them to cut Scrum Master positions and similar roles from their budgets.

Industry experts, such as the highly esteemed Marty Cagan, argue in his latest book “Transformed” and in related interviews that these roles, as currently defined, are either redundant or lack substantial value. As I interpreted it, Cagan asserts that the responsibilities typically assigned to Scrum Masters should fall to other team members, particularly the Product Manager. I can only partially agree with this suggestion when teams have evolved to mature self-managed levels.

Third Question

“What do you suggest to change the game and motivate scrum masters and their leaders/managers?”

I will combine my response to the first part of question two, “”What are the benefits of the value streams approach to get scrum masters interested in the subject” and question three.

Evolving the Scrum Master/Agile Leader role with VSM

I appreciate that the role of the Scrum Master/Agile Leader remains impartial and uninfluenced by any particular type of the team’s work — be it feature development, technical debt, defect resolution, or security risk. This neutrality allows for a balanced and objective focus on the team’s success. While other team roles have specific areas of focus, the Scrum Master is uniquely positioned to ensure the overall health and performance of the team, utilizing tools like Value Stream Management and Flow Metrics.

Motivation stems from the Scrum Master’s or Agile Leader’s commitment to the team’s overall performance. The primary responsibility of a Scrum Master or Agile Leader on a cross-functional delivery team is to enhance team effectiveness and support greater efficiency. This involves managing rituals, team health, performance metrics, retrospectives, and collaboration. By leveraging Agile and Lean methodologies and incorporating Value Stream Management (VSM), as I propose, these leaders can achieve these goals more effectively. With executive sponsorship and support, the Scrum Master or Agile Leader is ideally positioned to lead VSM initiatives, focusing on the team’s overall success rather than specific product features or technical solutions.

Delivery optimization and oversite responsibilities are natural progressions of responsibility for Agile Leaders. One way to achieve this is through Value Stream Management (VSM), which analyzes the product creation and delivery process. Each team member should understand VSM principles, and having a subject matter expert on the team enhances delivery efficiency and customer satisfaction. Integrating VSM oversight into the role of Scrum Master or Agile Leader helps optimize team performance and align efforts with business objectives, ultimately improving the delivery of business value.

Benefits:

  1. Holistic Team Focus:
    By integrating VSM, the Scrum Master can oversee and enhance the entire workflow, ensuring all processes contribute effectively to delivering value. This comprehensive perspective complements the Scrum Master’s focus on team health and performance.
  2. Enhanced Process Efficiency:
    VSM helps identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies in the delivery process. A Scrum Master with VSM responsibilities can facilitate improvements across the value stream, leading to faster and more reliable delivery of products.
  3. Balanced Work Prioritization:
    The Scrum Master can leverage VSM to encourage teams to balance work priorities more effectively. This ensures that feature development, technical debt, defect resolution, and security risks are all addressed appropriately. This can provide a more even distribution of effort and attention across different types of work.
  4. Improved Metrics and Insights:
    Integrating VSM allows the Scrum Master to track flow metrics and other key performance indicators that provide deeper insights into the team’s productivity and areas for improvement. This data-driven approach fosters continuous improvement initiatives and enables teams to identify actionable steps for enhancement.
  5. Enhanced Collaboration and Communication:
    With a focus on the entire value stream, the Scrum Master can better facilitate collaboration and communication between different team members and stakeholders, ensuring everyone is aligned on goals and processes.
  6. Strategic Alignment:
    By managing the value stream, the Scrum Master can ensure that the team’s work aligns with the organization’s strategic objectives, enhancing the overall value delivered to customers and stakeholders.

Challenges 

Integrating Value Stream Management (VSM) into Agile Leadership tackles the growing complexity of digital product environments. This approach requires a comprehensive perspective on product delivery and team efficiency beyond traditional task execution. However, VSM is still in its early adoption phase in the industry. Despite its strategic importance, expertise in optimizing value streams is scarce in the job market. Organizations like the one I led take proactive steps by recommending and providing VSM training to their Agile Leaders. VSM adoption necessitates investing in training, experimentation, and collaboration with industry experts.

Organizational Impact and Future Prospects 

Adding Value Stream Management capabilities elevates how software product delivery teams and their leaders perceive their contributions to organizational goals. By emphasizing continuous improvement and strategic value creation, Scrum Masters and Agile Leaders can be better equipped through VSM to influence and elevate cross-functional team performance and organizational outcomes. This transformation tackles some of the immediate skills gaps identified by ScrumMatch. It establishes a new benchmark for the capabilities of Agile practitioners’ responsibilities and overall team value, clarity, and flow.

Integrating Value Stream Management into the Agile Leadership role marks a significant evolution in Agile team practices. It bridges a crucial gap, enabling Agile practitioners to link their team’s daily activities with strategic business outcomes. Organizations embracing this approach will likely experience increased agility, better alignment with business goals, and superior performance, positioning them to tackle future challenges and seize opportunities more effectively.

References

  1. ScrumMatch, https://scrumatch.com/, Understanding Scrum Maturity, https://scrummatch.com/en/support/understanding-scrum-master-maturity
  2. ScrumMatch LinkedIn post, April 2024, https://www.linkedin.com/posts/scrummatch_hr-recruiting-scrummaster-activity-7183423788401762304-psjP?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop
  3. Scrum Masters play a role, LinkedIn Post, https://www.linkedin.com/posts/patricecorbard_hr-recruiting-scrummaster-activity-7185600586954788864-0FmS?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop, Patrice Corbard, April 2024.

Resources and Recommendations

Related Posts

Poking Holes

I invite your perspective on my posts. What are your thoughts?.

Let’s talk: [email protected]

Beyond Facilitation: The Agile Leader’s Place in Cross-Functional Team Dynamics

by

9 min read

“Alignment is a force multiplier.”

― Gereon Hermkes

I was invited recently to a meeting with Agile Leaders, Product Owners, and various cross-functional roles. The aim is to establish a regular meeting among team members to align on the reasoning behind our team structures, identify who leads the delivery, and clarify team roles. Following a word cloud exercise, it became evident that team members were not on the same page regarding why our teams are structured as they are, the essence of agility, diverse perspectives on metrics, and, notably, a product owner questioning the value of the Agile Leadership role on the team or not understanding the role responsibilities. Besides administrative tasks and facilitation, what are the responsibilities of a Scrum Master or Agile Leader?

What problem am I trying to address? Team alignment: should we have agile leaders within teams? If yes, what additional responsibilities do they carry beyond team facilitating rituals?

Questioning the Agile Leader role is not uncommon. More recently, certain organizations have dismissed these team members to cut costs, failing to recognize the significance of their role. They have redistributed some responsibilities among the remaining agile team members.

Cross-functional delivery teams striving for enhanced alignment on Agile and Lean practices, team purpose, responsibilities, and the Agile leader’s role may encounter hurdles. Conversations within my extensive network in the past two years and themes in various podcasts have shed light on the dynamic between Product Managers/Owners and Agile Leaders/Scrum Masters. In misaligned teams, Product Owners often scrutinize the roles of Scrum Masters or Agile Leaders, the team itself, its practices, and the accountability for the team’s deliverables.

Two books, among many that shaped my perspective

In Agile software development, balancing various responsibilities and understanding the unique team roles is crucial to fostering an environment that encourages efficiency, innovation, and adaptability. This article synthesizes insights from Agile methodologies, “Team Topologies” by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, and “Project to Product” by Mik Kersten, offering a comprehensive view on enhancing team dynamics for optimal performance. Here, we delve into the essence of Agile leadership, team composition, challenges linked to dominant product management, and the vital importance of harmonizing the four work types: features, defects, technical debt, and risk.

 “Team Topologies” emphasizes the importance of intentionally designing team structures and interactions to optimize workflows and enhance the software delivery process. This approach is fundamentally aligned with the principles of Agile methodology, where the focus is on creating teams that can operate with high autonomy, clear purpose, and minimal necessary interaction to reduce cognitive load and foster innovation.

The book introduces four fundamental team types: Stream-aligned teams, Enabling teams, Complicated Subsystem teams, and Platform teams. Each serves a unique purpose within the organization, from directly delivering value to customers to providing specialized knowledge or infrastructure that supports other teams. This structured approach to organizing teams underlines the necessity of having an Agile leader who is not only versed in facilitating collaboration and alignment but also skilled in navigating the team through the complexities of modern software development environments.

Reducing the unnecessary cognitive burden on teams, a fundamental concept elucidated in “Team Topologies,” clarifies why a product manager, already juggling multiple responsibilities, cannot effectively assume the role of an Agile leader. Product managers are crucial in shaping the product vision, aligning it with market demands, and focusing on customer-centric features and growth. On the other hand, Agile leaders foster team dialogues, ensuring a comprehensive understanding of the organization’s current and future states and that of the customer and system. This ensures conversations encompassing feature development, technical debt management, quality enhancement, and risk mitigation. By adopting this approach, the team’s efforts are channeled toward sustainable and high-quality software delivery.

“Project to Product” by Mik Kersten, enriches our understanding of Agile team dynamics and the importance of Agile leadership, especially in balancing different types of work. Kersten’s book emphasizes modern businesses need to adopt a continuous product-focused value stream to avoid becoming obsolete, much like Nokia or Blockbuster did. This approach aligns with Agile principles by focusing on delivering end-to-end value to customers, underscoring the critical role of Agile leaders in facilitating this process.

Kersten introduces the Flow Framework, which models the entire organization as a value stream, highlighting four types of work: features, defects, technical debt, and risk. This framework complements our discussion by providing a structured method for balancing these work types, ensuring that teams stay focused on one at the expense of others. A dominant product manager might skew the team’s efforts towards feature development, neglecting technical debt and risk mitigation. However, with their unbiased perspective and dedication to the team’s overall health, Agile leaders are crucial for ensuring that all types of work are addressed appropriately, aligning with organizational goals and the system’s performance.

“Project to Product” also challenges outdated business and technology ideas, advocating a shift from project-oriented management to a product-centric approach. This shift is essential for fostering Agile teams that are adaptable, collaborative, and capable of delivering continuous value. The book’s emphasis on avoiding local optimization and focusing on the end-to-end value stream resonates with the Agile leadership role in facilitating a balanced approach to work prioritization.

Incorporating Kersten’s insights, it becomes evident that Agile leadership is not just about facilitating daily stand-ups or managing sprints; it’s about embracing a broader vision that aligns team structures, software architecture, and value stream architecture. This alignment is essential for creating high-performing teams that can navigate the complexities of modern software development, delivering value rapidly and effectively while maintaining the health and performance of the entire system.

The conflation of product management with Agile leadership is a common pitfall 

An overbearing product manager, assuming control over the team and dictating priorities based on a singular focus on growth, can stifle the very essence of Agile methodology. Such an approach undermines the team’s autonomy and creativity, jeopardizing the product’s long-term sustainability and quality. It creates a culture of mistrust and resentment, diminishes morale, and disrupts the collaborative dynamics essential for Agile success.

The balance and interplay among Agile leadership, product management, and technical leadership are where the magic of Agile truly happens. Agile leaders ensure that all types of work — features, technical debt, quality assurance, and risk mitigation — are balanced and prioritized according to the team’s collective understanding of organizational goals. This balanced approach, guided by Agile leadership, empowers teams to deliver high-quality products that meet customer needs while fostering an environment of continuous improvement and adaptation.

Agile leadership, like product ownership or the technical leader, is not about hierarchical control but about enabling a culture of collaboration, empowerment, and excellence. It’s about guiding teams through the complexities of software development, ensuring that every member feels valued, heard, and motivated to contribute their best. When product owners or managers question their role, Agile leaders have a compelling narrative to share — one that underscores their critical contribution to nurturing high-performing teams that are agile, resilient, and aligned with the organization’s strategic goals.

The strength of Agile software development lies in its emphasis on people, interactions, and customer-centric outcomes. By affirming the unique value of Agile leadership, organizations can ensure that their teams are efficient and productive, engaged, innovative, and aligned with a shared vision for success. This holistic approach to team dynamics and delivery sets Agile apart, making it an indispensable methodology for achieving excellence in today’s fast-paced and ever-evolving software development landscape.

Understanding our Agile team structure

Agile teams are intentionally cross-functional, comprising diverse skill sets and expertise to ensure that the team is self-sufficient in delivering value. This structure is designed to provide all the skills needed to deliver value in a team, foster collaboration, encourage shared accountability, and facilitate rapid responses to change while focusing on delivering customer value. 

Every team member contributes unique value, whether developers, quality assurance specialists, or product managers. While we require various specific roles, no single role outweighs the importance of others. Instead, Agile thrives on peer-to-peer interaction, underscoring the importance of every team member being seen as equals. This egalitarian approach eliminates silos, encourages open communication, and leverages the collective wisdom of the team to overcome challenges and seize opportunities.

The ecosystem of roles

In a high-performing department, Agile teams, renowned for their collaborative approach, typically consist of developers, quality assurance specialists, product managers, and Agile leaders like Scrum Masters. This diverse structure promotes autonomy and swift adaptation to change, highlighting peer-to-peer engagement and transparent communication. The power of Agile lies in breaking down barriers and harnessing shared expertise.

The Agile Leadership role

At the core of the Agile framework lies the Agile leader. This role can be a topic of debate, especially when compared to dominant product management. The Agile leader is not another cog in the wheel of task execution but a pivotal force that empowers the team to reach its full potential. Unlike product managers, who focus on market demands and product features, Agile leaders bring unique skills to nurture team health, streamline processes, and uphold Agile values. The Agile leader operates from a vantage point of neutrality, emphasizing team health, process efficiency, and adherence to Agile principles. They act as the team’s compass in navigating work complexities, stressing collaboration, team coherence in four types of work, problem-solving, and continuous improvement. 

  1. Delivery efficiency and optimization: Measuring flow (delivery efficiency) and realization (value impact) ensures you’re building the right things and building them efficiently. Operational efficiency improvements must focus on both. As Value Stream Management subject matter experts, agile leaders help the team improve delivery efficiency and flow. They can help the teams identify bottlenecks and waste and improve flow. They analyze the data and bring the conversations to the team to understand bottlenecks and experiment with improvements. They challenge product managers or owners to define and track anticipated outcomes to avoid misalignment with broader goals, championing the importance of feedback loops in verifying value realization and “closing the loop.”
  2. Facilitation Skills: Agile leaders are trained in facilitation techniques to conduct effective meetings, workshops, and Agile ceremonies. This ensures that team interactions are productive, engaging, and aligned with Agile principles.
  3. Coaching and Mentoring: A significant part of Agile leadership training involves coaching and mentoring skills. Agile leaders learn how to coach team members, foster a growth mindset, and facilitate personal and professional development within the team.
  4. Conflict Resolution: Agile leaders are equipped with conflict resolution techniques to navigate and mitigate interpersonal conflicts within the team. This training is crucial for maintaining a collaborative team environment.
  5. Change Management: Agile transformation often involves significant changes in team dynamics and organizational culture. Agile leaders are trained in change management strategies to smoothly transition teams to Agile ways of working, ensuring buy-in and minimizing resistance.
  6. Neutrality: The Agile leader is the team’s compass, steering the group through the complexities of project delivery without bias towards any specific type of work. They aim to ensure the team can perform at its best, irrespective of the work type—new features, technical debt, bug fixes, or risk mitigation.
  7. Removing Impediments: Agile leaders are skilled in identifying and removing obstacles that hinder the team’s progress. Their sole incentive is the team’s success, which allows them to act impartially and decisively in addressing challenges that impede efficiency and productivity.
  8. Promoting Agile Values and Practices: Through coaching and mentoring, Agile leaders instill and reinforce Agile values within the team, promoting practices that enhance collaboration, continuous improvement, and customer satisfaction. They are the custodians of Agile ceremonies, ensuring that these practices are meaningful and contribute to the team’s growth and success.
  9. Ensuring Collaboration and Consensus: In fostering a collaborative team environment, Agile leaders ensure that decisions are made collectively, with input from all team members. This consensus-building approach ensures alignment with organizational goals and harnesses the team’s collective expertise.

On the flip side, the role of the product manager or owner is distinct yet crucial. They act as the link between customer needs, business goals, and the development team. Their main aim is the product’s success — establishing the vision, deciding on features, and ensuring deliverables meet market demands. While focusing on product and growth is key, it can sometimes narrow the perspective by prioritizing feature development over critical aspects like addressing technical debt, ensuring product quality, and managing risks.

Conclusion

Your choice is how you organize your teams, considering that context varies and there is no one-size-fits-all approach. I acknowledge the importance of the Agile Leadership role in propelling our team to success. The alignment among Agile leadership, product management, and technical proficiency is crucial for top-tier Agile teams. Agile leaders foster team engagement and advancement by leveraging data insights, assessing efficiency metrics, handling team dynamics, promoting team coherence on objectives, and facilitating necessary discussions for teams to align with current requirements and establish work priorities. Collaborating, embracing shared responsibility, and managing diverse work types are vital for team efficiency and focusing on delivering sustainable, high-caliber software solutions. Making decisions on features, defects, technical debt, and risks in line with organizational objectives is essential for the overall health and performance of systems and solutions.

Related Posts

Poking Holes

I invite your perspective to analyze this post further – whether by invalidating specific points or affirming others. What are your thoughts?.

Let’s talk: phil.clark@rethinkyourunderstanding.

Unpacking The State of Value Stream Management Report 2023

by

3 min read

VSM Adoption

In December 2020, I introduced Value Stream Management (VSM) and Flow Metrics to our teams. Our journey of adoption has been a continuous learning experience, drawing insights from the Value Stream Management Consortium and other industry leaders as we exchange experiences. Over the past three years since our initial adoption, VSM has made significant strides in the industry.

VSMC State of Value Stream Management Report

Since 2021, The VSM Consortium1 annual State of Value Stream Management Report2 offers a comprehensive overview of the recent evolution in this field. This year’s report covers valuable insights that deserve careful analysis and distillation. I’d like to highlight three aspects that have captured my attention regarding measuring and prioritizing value and the accompanying advice provided.

Measuring Value:

  1. Value Reporting Lines Matter (slide 19): Teams reporting to CEOs indicate higher Performance and a closer connection between software engineering teams and the rest of the organization.
  2. Value Metrics (slide 20): Organizations prioritize business over customer metrics. Typical metrics include sales/revenue, active users, feature usage, NPS, and profit margin.
  3. Key Practices (slide 21): The report highlights the importance of measuring the value achieved, taking into account observability and customizing metrics based on the nature of the work.

Leading with Value:

  1. Visualizing the Entire Organization as a Value Stream Network is Key (slide 25): According to the data, one-third of the respondents have visually documented their organization as a network of interconnected value streams. The findings indicate that higher-performing organizations and larger companies are inclined to perceive their organization as a value stream network.
  2. VSM Implementation Roadmap (slides 23-24): VSM practices have evolved, and organizations can use an implementation roadmap to track progress. The “Connect” step has experienced significant growth. Respondents who complete the ‘Connect’ steps are 5-10% likelier to achieve a lead time of less than one week. Conversely, those who haven’t completed any roadmap steps are over three times as likely to have the longest lead time, exceeding three months, compared to those who have completed any step—and four times more likely than those who completed the Connect steps. Next is the inclusion of the Assess stage in the roadmap this year. Establishing a baseline of the current state when starting a journey and measuring progress as an organization progresses is important. This new step provides a comprehensive understanding of the journey and enables effective progress monitoring.
  3. Organizational Performance (slide 26): VSM adoption drives organizational Performance by aligning teams, making work visible, and using insights for continuous improvement.

Advice Section (slide 27):

  1. For Change Agents: Emphasizes the importance of visualizing work, taking data-driven actions, focusing on value realization, and understanding that flow and value realization are equally important.
  2. For CXOs: Advocates for aligning teams, visualizing value stream networks, connecting product management and software engineering, and adopting a data and insight-driven approach.
  3. For Product Creators and Software Engineering: Encouraging collaboration between product creators and software engineers, adopting VSM as a framework, and having a dedicated value stream lead (something we will consider for 2024).

Final Thought

This report sheds light on the evolving world of Value Stream Management, its impact on organizational dynamics, and its importance in the broader business landscape.

The adoption of Value Stream Management (VSM) is gaining momentum, and organizations must stay current with this trend. The VSM Consortium is a fantastic hub for VSM knowledge, education, and assistance. It’s an invaluable resource for anyone looking to dive into the world of VSM!

References:

  1. Value Stream Management Consortium, https://vsmconsortium.thinkific.com/
  2. The State of Value Stream Management Report 2023, https://www.vsmconsortium.org/state-of-value-stream-management-reports

Poking Holes

I invite your perspective on my posts. What are your thoughts?.

Let’s talk: [email protected]