Digital Product Management Thinking: Integrating Analytics, Business Model, Coordination and Design Thinking

by Varun Nagaraj

Simulation results support conventional wisdom that shorter sprint lengths reduce the gap between market wants and the delivered performance of released products. This is also known as a “fail fast and review often,” strategy, which enables the development organization to learn and adapt to the market. However, a team cannot continue to arbitrarily reduce the sprint length. After a point, the incorporation of a planning delay or slowing down actually improves matters. Incorporating a planning delay enables learning and sensemaking (Nagaraj et al., 2017) and reduces overreaction to spurious signals. Blindly using agile could result in teams giving up too quickly or over-reacting to negative market feedback that might just be noise. But incorporating analytics thinking and taking the time to separate the signal from the noise makes the agile process more robust.