By Andrew Park | 2024-09-11
Gary Cohen is a seasoned software development leader and product development consultant with over 20 years of experience. As the Principal Consultant at Practical Agility LLC, Gary works with organizations ranging from startups to Fortune 10 companies to improve their agile practices and drive better outcomes for customers and employees. His leadership roles have spanned across major companies such as Assurance Software, Oracle, and Kenexa, where he has led agile transformations, integrated multiple acquisitions, and built high-performing development teams. Gary is a strong advocate for continuous improvement, customer feedback, and empowering teams to achieve success.
His Agile credentials include Certified Scrum Master, Certified Product Owner, ICP-Agile Facilitation, ICP-Agile Coaching, and Path to Agility Practitioner. Gary’s extensive experience in software development leadership, product management, and agile coaching makes him uniquely positioned to assess the current state of Agile and how it can better align with product management needs.
Insights on Reimagining Agile from Gary Cohen
1. Lack of Focus on Product Discovery
Gary Cohen highlighted that Agile has historically focused heavily on delivery rather than discovery. He believes that Agile needs to shift its emphasis to ensure that teams are not just delivering software but building the right things.
Key Insight:
“We seem to never ask ourselves, are we building the right things?… Agile is still very focused on the product delivery side and not enough on the product discovery side.”
Cohen believes this creates a disconnect between product management and engineering teams, where engineers are often working on tasks without understanding if they’re aligned with real customer value.
2. Misalignment with Product Vision and Strategy
Agile practices, especially Scrum, tend to fragment product vision and strategy into small increments (sprints), which product managers often find difficult to reconcile with long-term product planning.
Key Insight:
“Even if we’re delivering every couple of weeks, we’re essentially going off of that fixed plan… We forget, and it becomes more like, okay, we’re just pulling stuff off the backlog and working on it.”
Cohen suggests that while Agile excels at delivery, it often falls short when adapting product vision throughout a project.
3. Agile Fails to Incorporate Ongoing Product Discovery
Cohen advocates for continuous product discovery, which is rarely baked into most Agile frameworks like Scrum or XP. The disconnect between product discovery and product delivery is one of the key failures he highlights.
Key Insight:
“Today, teams often do discovery once upfront, and then it becomes a backlog that the Scrum team works through. There’s no continual discovery process baked into most Agile methods, even though we’re supposed to be learning as we go.”
He points to Teresa Torres’ Continuous Discovery Habits as a potential solution that Agile methodologies could adopt to address this gap.
4. Overemphasis on Flow, Efficiency, and Velocity
Another point Cohen makes is the focus on flow, efficiency, and velocity over outcomes. He notes how Agile and Scrum promote speed without ensuring that the work aligns with business value or customer needs.
Key Insight:
“We spend so much time on flow and efficiency, God forbid, velocity, right? We focus on that sort of thing. But if we’re really focused on the outcomes, then getting better at figuring out what our customers will actually use and find valuable is more important.”
Cohen implies that Agile’s focus on delivery metrics often leads to product managers prioritizing short-term deliverables over long-term value creation.
5. Two-Week Sprints Misaligned with Product Management Needs
Agile’s sprint-based approach can often be a mismatch for product managers who need time to conduct strategic long-term planning.
Key Insight:
“Agile’s two-week sprint mentality forces product managers to continually fill the backlog, but it doesn’t leave enough time for strategic, long-term thinking… Product managers are trying to feed the team now, but they don’t have the time to step back and think strategically.”
He explains that this constant cycle of feeding backlogs reduces the opportunity for product managers to focus on finding market fit and differentiated value proposition.
6. Scrum’s Overhead and Meeting Fatigue
Cohen mentioned that one of the major complaints he hears from product managers is the number of meetings involved in Scrum or Agile processes, and how they often fail to provide useful information or outcomes.
Key Insight:
“One of the big complaints I often hear about Agile is the number of meetings. Even though it eliminates the need for other meetings, it ends up being a drain on time and doesn’t have enough meat in it.”
Cohen moved away from traditional Agile methods when they didn't provide value, focusing instead on collaboration, quick feedback, and continuous improvement.
7. Overemphasis on Agile Roles and Certification
Cohen has observed how Agile and Scrum certifications have added unnecessary complexity and overhead without addressing the core issues. He argues that the focus has shifted from delivering value and creating better products to ‘doing Agile right.’
Key Insight:
“We’ve put so much overhead on quote-unquote doing Agile right that no wonder executives start saying the cost and complexity of Agile aren’t worth it… We’ve achieved delivery efficiency but not product outcomes.”
He warns that this dilution of Agile practices has led to inefficiencies, where the focus is on rigid roles like Scrum Masters instead of fostering real collaboration and alignment between teams.
8. AI’s Impact on Agile and the Need for Change
Cohen points out that with AI increasing the speed of software delivery, Agile methodologies that focus primarily on delivery will become even less relevant. This necessitates a shift toward product discovery and outcomes.
Key Insight:
“Agile is still focused on delivery, but AI will speed up software development. With delivery becoming easier, Agile needs to evolve to focus more on product discovery and delivering customer value, not just delivering software.”
He believes Agile’s future must incorporate AI and focus on discovery as the primary competitive differentiator.
9. Need for Greater Executive Support in Agile Transformations
Cohen emphasizes that many Agile transformations fail because product management and engineering teams don’t have enough executive support, and Agile frameworks don’t address this issue.
Key Insight:
“You need executives to buy into prioritizing product discovery and adapting to changing needs, not just focusing on delivery timelines.”
Without top-level support, product managers and teams are often pressured into sticking with initial plans rather than adapting to new insights or market conditions.
Conclusion:
Gary Cohen’s insights reveal that current-day methodologies are failing to adequately address the strategic needs of product management, particularly in the areas of continuous discovery, finding market fit, and effective collaboration between product and engineering teams. To reimagine Agile, there must be a stronger focus on product discovery, flexibility in sprint cycles, and reducing overhead in favor of outcome-driven processes.
