"The 3 i's"

The first thing that crosses your mind when you hear the words “iterations”, “increments” & “improvements” is – AGILE!, isn’t it? But, you ought to know they really have a much wider application.

The Notions

Just supposing you happen to hear the words:

• Iterations

• Increments

• Improvements

even though not in that specific order, what’s the first thing that crosses your mind as of today?

If you’re from the software development background it ought to ring a bell in a flash, isn’t it?

It’s AGILE!

But, I hate it break this to all the “practitioners” of the world who swear by the name of “AGILE” today holding it up close to their hearts.

NO.

“Agile isn’t an invention of any sort & there’s nothing new about those rules that form a part of the manifesto which people didn’t already know about or hadn’t already heard about earlier.”

It’s just that a few rules that were already well known to large sections in some selective pockets of the world totally derived from common sense was collated & perhaps implemented as a pilot just to see how it all goes. When it did work at their end, they perhaps got to think more formally about it and built what we know today as a manifesto.

But, taking nothing away, as it’s good in a way that something like an Agile manifesto got defined as some large corporates follow them meticulously like clockwork and have made it their “mantra” & ab-initio for anyone who wants to join them as adhering to it has been working really well for them. They seem to be able to align teams better, build a shared understanding amongst teams involved & help them collaborate efficiently & on top of that list majorly is being able to ship faster. Also, not to discount the way some startups & product based organizations too follow Agile although they seem to be more open to chop & change based on situations.

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The Reality

The reality is totally different and I have more than enough reason to believe that the basic stem of the approach which forms the backbone of modern day Agile isn’t anything new at all.

Let me explain it by considering a few scenarios taking a leap out of a few of those pages of my experience & combined with the common knowledge of the world.

Scenario 1: Just another day in Advertising

Talk of the mid & late 90s and am sure anyone who has had a stint in marketing / advertising would agree with me on this. There were creative teams who used to book the meeting room (back then it was called the discussion room) for almost 3/4th of a day in order to discuss ideas and come up with concepts for adverts to be carried over as final & that understanding being passed on to the designers & creative team members to iteratively work on those ideas and improve those visuals incrementally before the creative director / head approves it as good to go, though very few would have loved the aura around that office as all one could have heard was people screaming on top of their lungs over getting their opinions voiced & to be carried across the board.

To an outsider / onlooker a visit to such an office might have been unforgettable & an experience of a lifetime, as he might have heard people getting into an acute degree of verbal squabbling, almost seeming like a duel forcing him to form a war-like picture painted in his memory with everyone going for each other’s throats with swords & daggers in their hands & when the reality is far from that.

Discounting the element of decorum for a second, I put this question to you now.

If that’s not an “iterative” brainstorming session targeted at “incrementally improving” the content which actively contributes towards the generation of creative assets right from the pitch / the copy / the whole advert, what else could that be?

And, just to quote those sessions might have been a regular affair, starting it again from where they left off the previous day. The war-like intensity would have seemed like it has got more aggravated when the scope of that discussion remains all the same with teams just barely moving from Silo-1 to Silo-2 over shaping, structuring & bettering it all furthermore.

Come to think of it, I don’t think there’s any great change even today over the manner & approach taken by the advertising & marketing teams. Only that, meeting rooms might have got substituted with Online ZOOM / Google Meet calls, but that intensity of arguments / brainstorming still remains the same.

Scenario 2: Product ideation

When some of you reading here might be pondering over how that previous scenario transported you way back into time and may be questioning my choice, here’s another example that could be more relatable and closely represent your workflows given today’s timeline.

Think of how product teams start off their work - a place where it all starts:

The “Ideation phase”

– where tons of ideas get generated seamlessly

- And, what’s the worst thing one can do with those ideas:

• directly start building as soon as they get generated!

- There are no second thoughts about the fact that ideas need:

• a pipeline of some sort where they get placed, considered, vetted, validated around all aspects right from organizational goals, alignment, users, pain points, markets, product ecosystem – aka “The IDEA BACKLOG”

• and a placeholder of some sort where one such idea is picked from that backlog and pushed onto teams so that it could be given its due consideration to enable the merited & unbiased brainstorming time it deserves

And, that’s where the ideas and the way they get cleared through those stages before they are earmarked, selected, refined & considered good to be moved into the product backlog could be thought of as a funnel with each of those brainstorming steps acting like filters working their way to gradually eliminate & decrease the final number of them to be taken ahead - aka “PRUNING / REFINING the BACKLOG”.

So, you could picture an idea funnel to be something like this:

Guru Prasad - "The Product Web" 🕸 @BgpInv

It’s a great practice to picture the ideation cycle as a funnel for the good of everyone involved - raw ideas = 75 - relevant ideas = 65 - aligned with goals = 30 - validated = 10 - completed discovery & good to go into the backlog = 5 #productmanagement #ideas #ideafunnel

Each idea being considered from the “Idea backlog” could be thought of as passing through various stages in the funnel, some prominent ones could be:

Here’s a pictorial representation of the funnel & the process.

And, the idea itself ought to be subjected through a vigorous vetting processes & each and every step which could be thought of as being iterative in its own ought to result in a tangible improvement which could be better targeting, better segmentation, better specificity in the whole problem definition and that ought to happen incrementally.

So, here again, it is very evident how the whole process completely adheres to those steps where in iterations & increments lead to improvements.

NOTE: When the stages depicted here in the funnel are just a symbolic representation and could be thought of as evolving as they pass through each step, please beware that nothing is written in stone & there ought to be absolutely no surprise that those stages could as well change based on the organization and the product under consideration.

And, as I have always been saying, “what good is a framework / model if it can’t be chopped / changed / molded based on situations”.

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Conclusion

Iterations leading to improvements in small increments are really a good way to perceive any constructive activity taking it from a raw / nascent stage to a ready-to-go stage.

Although made tremendously popular in the last decade by the Agile manifesto, this stage-wise process of growing from “raw” to something “tangible” / “usable” is pretty old and could be pictured as fitting into many places including idea generation & not to mention, multiple other areas of general management.

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