I’m back from Agile2024, and it was good to be back after a 6 year hiatus. I caught up with some old friends, made some new acquaintances, and had some great discussions along the way.

Some of those discussions will influence future issues of InsideProduct, and others will go down as obnoxiously long running inside jokes.

If you're wondering about the latter, ask me about retractable stairs or comic sans the next time you see me.

While I’m not going to talk about those topics here, I did want to share some of my observations from the conference.

My Conference Takeaway: Product Value Curves

One reason I wanted to chair the Accelerating Products track at Agile2024 is to bring a more explicit discussion of outcome and impact to the agile community.

Sure, there’s always been that undercurrent in the agile zeitgeist, but more often than not, when the topic came to business value, the discussion began to resemble talking about obscenity (I’ll know it when I see it) or write offs.

One of the sessions last week explained a tool that makes the concept of business value much more useful for making product decisions.

Product Value Curves | A practical approach to building effective product strategy

Have you ever had to come up with a product strategy for an area which is already functioning well, critical to business/your organization and involves tools/services used by different stakeholders who are all measuring successfully?

​Lakshmi Sowjanya Uppala​shared personal experience of building a product strategy and roadmap impacting billions of transactions done and products sold on Amazon, involving multiple stakeholder teams with conflicting success metrics by starting from users, jobs to be done and product value curves.

This is practical for large- and small-scale products equally and enables creation of multi-year product roadmaps with incremental wins to users and business value.

My Take

Product value curves give you a meaningful way to talk about “business value” that you can use to influence your roadmap. Identify specific attributes that are relevant to your target persona to describe business value so you aren’t left in a “I’ll know it when I see it” scenario.

Agile2024 Recaps

The above session overview came about as I decided a day into the conference to share recaps of all the sessions in the Accelerating Products track.

The idea came about from a piece of advice I often give to people going to conferences with multiple concurrent talks. If there are multiple sessions going on at the same time, go to one, and then find the speaker from the other afterwards and have a nice conversation about what they talked about.

So I decided to try an experiment. I thought I'd share brief descriptions of the talks going on at Agile2024. If you didn't make it to the conference and something sounds interesting, reach out to the presenters to get a bit more insight.

Since I haven’t figured out how to be in multiple places at the same time, I enlisted the help of others to share their insights from the sessions I didn’t make it to.

​Monday Recap​

​Tuesday Recap​

​Thursday Recap​

​Friday Recap​

Note: I didn’t do a recap from Wednesday since that was an open space day, which afforded the opportunity to talk about elevators in single story houses and Papyrus.

The state of agile coaching and product coaching

Another reason I went to the conference was to get a sense of the current state of agile. There’s been a bit of chatter about the decline in agile coaching opportunities as well as trends in agile transformations in general.

I certainly picked up some inklings about what’s going on, but I don’t want to rush to judgement. To help me put together an informed view, I’d like to find out the motivation behind people choosing to become agile coaches and/or product coaches.

To help with that research, I put a couple of polls out on LinkedIn. Please leave a response in the appropriate poll and share with your networks so I get as many data points as possible.

​Agile Coaching Poll​

​Product Coaching Poll​

I plan to share my thoughts and the results in a future issue of InsideProduct.

Thanks for reading

Thanks again for reading InsideProduct.

If you have any comments or questions about the newsletter, or there’s anything you’d like me to cover, let me know.

Talk to you next time,

Kent J. McDonald Founder | KBP.Media