Leadership Doesn’t Care About MVP
MVP is the most over-used and abused mindset that agile is promoting, not because it’s not a good idea, but because few organizations are set up in a way to support working this way.
Two fundamental issues face most organizations who want to be agile:
1. Annual funding cycles prohibit MVP delivery as the project or initiative that is being funded requires a certain amount of scope to be identified for the idea to obtain funding.
2. Teams are organized around products or capabilities, and in many cases, projects and initiatives are staffed by external vendors who require a known set of requirements before they start working.
Working in an MVP approach will not work for these teams and no amount of preaching MVP to them will work.
My suggestion is to move away from Minimum Viable Product since few teams work on anything close to what we would define as a product and, instead view MVP as a Minimum Viable Phase.
Helping teams focus on work that lays the foundation for project success is more important than thinking in Product terminology. We can be ‘agile’ within this context, such as working in small increments, identifying risks sooner, and baking in quality right at the outset.
We have to understand the leaders don’t care about the methodology you use to deliver, they just care that something was delivered.
Until we understand that things like MVP don’t and won’t resonate with leadership because in their mind experimentation equates to waste, in dollars and time, neither of which organizations have in endless supply.
Agile presumes that leaders want to engage in the process of delivery, and the reality is that most don’t, they simply don’t have the time to focus on what their technology teams are doing. It’s not that they aren’t concerned about this important investment, it’s just that the worlds of business and technology have always been uncomfortable partners.
The organizations that are most successful in the world today have figured out how to make technology a primary partner to their business.
We often hear that organizations, regardless of their business domain, need to think like a technology company and I think that is probably the first step in the process of changing the mindset of how you view your organization.
If you view your business as a bank, then everything you do looks like what banks have historically done. But if you view your business as a technology that happens to provide banking services, then you can start to expand your idea of what is possible.
Changing your mindset will set you down a much different path, one where experimentation and MVP start to have relevance. Calibrated risk-taking via MVP that limits investments in bad ideas becomes the norm and not the exception.
