How Do You Prioritize Value Delivery in Agile?

In an agile environment, the Product Manager & Product Owner are responsible for deciding what should be delivered first, during each iteration. Their work is crucial to the success of product development.

To begin to understand how organizations make priority decisions in an agile environment, we must first define the meaning of the word "value."

What is Value Delivery?

Value is an important aspect of the agile environment; it is the process by which value is created through the collaboration between the customer and the development team.

Value delivery is the act of shipping value to the customer. It is a process that has a positive impact on the customer and the business. It is an outcome of a development cycle that contains all the following:

1. Clear definition of what constitutes value for customers

2. Specification of what must be delivered to meet those criteria

3. Design and implementation of those deliverables

4. Feedback from those who receive those deliverables about whether they are meeting those criteria.

Scrum.org's Evidence-Based Management Guide offers four types of value to consider.

Value – Four Types

1.  Current Value: This is the current value of the product that has been delivered recently. It is concerned about the product’s potential/future, and about how satisfied customers, stakeholders, and employees are with the present status of the product.

2. Unrealized Value: By thinking about the unrealized value of a product, you can investigate potential new markets and identify profitable areas in which to invest.

3. Time-To-Market: Time to market is a measurement of how long it takes your team to add value to the business. The time-to-market factor depends on the effectiveness of the development process and the speed at which it is carried out. If you delay validating and testing your product, your market strategy will be hindered. The company should evaluate its functional requirements—from implementation through deployment to release—to reduce downtime.

Knowing your time to market helps you keep track of how quickly you can test your products for customers and how quickly you can make changes based on customer demands.

4. Ability To Innovate: It is an indication of your professionalism, that you are able to communicate new skills effectively to your customers. By critically examining your ability to innovate, you can understand the barriers that prevent your team from taking advantage of the opportunity to provide new customer experience.

Points To Remember: Prioritizing Value

·       A good product owner prefers a value based on the maturity of the product.

·       New products need to focus more on unrealized value. The basic, essential features of the product must first of all be functional.

·       As a product matures in the market, its value proposition needs to be reviewed.

Optimize Value Delivery

Product owners should consider time to market and the ability to innovate, both of which are technical in nature and drop out of focus when priorities are set based on unrealized value. Failing to prioritize time and to innovate hampers the ability of teams to develop new features.

Focusing on actual and unrealized value will lead to minor product changes. Ignoring time-to-market and innovation, a company’s economic value of a project declines as product changes become more expensive.

Final Thoughts

An agile environment is a workplace that encourages continuous learning and rapid response to change. It allows for rapid feedback loops, which helps teams deliver better products more efficiently.

To learn more about agile methods like Scrum and SAFe, people should consider going for agile training such as:

1. Scrum Master Certification

2. Certified Scrum Product Owner Certification

3. SAFe Certification: SA, SSM, POPM, LPM, and more.