Products and Solutions

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– Steve Jobs

Definition: A Solution is a product, system, or service that provides value to internal or external customers.

What are products and solutions?

A product or solution represents something of value that an organization develops for either internal or external customers. The term product is typically used to describe something that solves a specific problem, whereas a solution is more often a combination of products and services that address more complex customer problems. In almost all cases, the use of the terms products and solutions is determined by how each individual organization packages and releases value. Regardless of how they are defined in a specific context, the attributes and guidance described in this article apply in all cases.

Examples of products and solutions range from a small mobile application built by a single Agile Release Train (ART) to a large automotive system of systems built by a network of development value streams (DVSs) as part of a supply chain to a banking service offered by a financial institution. Some products and solutions directly support the operational workflows of the organization. For instance, a bank might offer a mobile app for customers to use and have call center software for their employees. Other products and solutions help customers in their daily activities. For example, an airline uses airplanes and other tools to manage how they deliver passengers.

Informed by the product or solution’s vision, backlog, and roadmap, practitioners in a DVS define, build, validate, and release solutions to customers, as shown in Figure 1.

Successful products and solutions are:

• Desirable – Do customers and users want it?
• Feasible – Can we deliver it through a combination of build, buy, partner, or acquire endeavors?
• Viable – Is how we build it creating more value than cost?
• Sustainable – Are we proactively managing it to account for its expected lifecycle?

The remainder of this article describes these four qualities.

What makes a product or solution desirable?

Products and solutions must be desirable to the portfolio stakeholders who invest in them, the customers who purchase them, and the end-users who interact with them. Businesses build many products and solutions and have opportunities to create many others. However, just because an organization can build something does not mean it should. Portfolio Leaders are responsible for determining what to build to best support the portfolio’s strategy.

Figure 2 shows a portion of a portfolio vision. It informs the development value streams needed to build the products and solutions and shows how their performance (KPIs) will deliver the portfolio’s objectives and KPIs.

Agile Teams and ARTs apply a customer-centric mindset to build desirable products and solutions that connect with customers and address their needs. Some customers are direct end-users, and others are indirect customers who will pay for and specify the product or solution but will not use it themselves. Agile teams and ARTs apply design thinking to understand and empathize with all customers and ensure that the product or solution is desirable to all.

What makes products and solutions feasible?

Creating new and innovative solutions requires a range of skills and resources. Digital disruption has allowed businesses to enter and disrupt new markets. For example, Apple outsold the entire Swiss watch industry just four years after launching the Apple Watch. To compete, organizations must have the technical knowledge and strategic partners to build innovative solutions and evolve them rapidly to meet changing customer and market demands..

Organizations use Lean-Agile methods to encourage a culture of continuous learning. Collaborating with suppliers can bring invaluable knowledge, real-world experience, and valuable components that teams can use. However, organizations are less likely to partner if supply chains move too slowly to meet business goals or when the technology is vital strategically. Then, they tend to develop skills internally through training, hiring new employees, or making strategic purchases.

Modular designs that communicate through defined interfaces allow ARTs and teams to evolve their parts of the product and solution independently and accelerate value delivery. Some provide direct value to an end-user; others are modules (also called components or subsystems) that are parts of a larger product or solution. New products and solutions are often derived from, or built on top of, existing products and solutions. This helps accelerate value delivery, reduce development costs, and improve quality. They come from various sources, including internal and external suppliers and open-source communities (Figure 3).

Architects intentionally decompose products and solutions into modules that teams and ARTs can design and deliver independently. Modules are:

• Decomposed: Independent parts that communicate through managed interfaces. Applying a Domain-Driven Design produces products and solutions that are easier to change, test, and incrementally develop.
• Nested: Modules may contain other nested modules, resulting in a hierarchy. Layered systems are a typical pattern for nesting modules.
• Integrated: Nested modules are combined to deploy and execute to support all levels of testing and operation. The continuous delivery pipeline (CDP) enables this process.
• Distributed: Modules may execute on multiple devices or locations to reduce response times, provide higher throughput, offer fault tolerance, and support other non-functional requirements (NFRs).

Some independently releasable modules are called value streamlets (see Release on Demand), which allow teams to independently evolve, deploy, and release without waiting for other teams.

Products and solutions also have intent and context. Intent defines critical requirements and design constraints, including key decisions. Context describes the operational environment for installation, usage, and support. Together, intent and context guide the implementation.

Teams and ARTs apply lean systems engineering and ‘SAFe Principle #3 – Assume variability; preserve options’ by specifying the product and solution’s intent and context incrementally. Decisions known early in the development lifecycle are fixed. Others may vary as teams gain knowledge by exploring alternatives using set-based design to find optimal implementations.

What makes products and solutions viable?

The value to the company must offset the cost of building and operating a product or solution (Figure 5). Typically, that is simple to quantify using development costs, operating costs, and licensing fees, for example. Quantifying value, however, can be trickier. Products and solutions can provide multiple types of value:

• Monetary
• Improved operations
• Market share maintenance or expansion
• New data and insights about consumers and the operational environment

To realize the full value, customers need more than great features. They also need excellent service, pre-sales support, documentation, training, reasonable pricing, follow-through from a reputable company, and more. Customers expect these to be part of the overall offering.

As shown in Figure 6, whole-product thinking ensures positive experiences throughout the customer’s journey—from purchase to first use, to experienced usage, to upgrades, and even through replacement and decommissioning. Product Management defines the minimal expected product a customer would purchase and the augmented and potential product that differentiates their offering and attracts future customers. The product or solution roadmap forecasts the augmented and potential features over time.

Solutions evolve

To meet customers’ and markets’ changing needs, teams need to deliver new features quickly, get feedback, and adjust. A fast, automated, continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline gives teams and ARTs quick feedback on small developments and changes tested in a development environment which offers a close, realistic proxy of the operational environment, as shown in Figure 7.

Creating products and solutions that change over time requires extra guardrails. The system should allow updates while running and gather information on how it’s being used. The design should help collect data regarding user actions in its environment for feedback. The plan for building and improving the solution should also keep track of this work and predict future needs.

What makes products and solutions sustainable?

Products and solutions move through predictable stages, known as the product lifecycle as shown in Figure 8. These stages are introduction to growth, growth to maturity, and maturity to decline. Products and solutions must frequently evolve to address new market segments and customer needs.

The product lifecycle demonstrates why using a Lean-Agile approach is vital. In the early stages, products and solutions often start as minimal viable products (MVPs). These MVPs help teams gather information to test whether the idea is valid. By releasing updates quickly and often, teams gain new insights about users, the market, and technical choices. This helps them improve their plans, adjust their backlogs, and sometimes even rethink their overall vision. As described earlier, the continuous delivery pipeline (CDP) enables the frequent, cost-effective changes needed to evolve the solution over its lifecycle.

Sustainability has now taken on additional meaning. In today’s context, sustainable products and solutions also deliver tangible economic, social, and environmental benefits throughout their lifecycle.

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References

[1] Kersten, Mik. Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework. IT Revolution Press, 2018.