Identify Your Product Type

Projects allow you to organize a team of people around managing the risks to create and release the product. I am using the word product purposefully here. You may be accustomed to using the words release or system or application. Those words describe how the customers will use the product. However, if you have customers and you want to use an agile approach, consider thinking about products. That word will help you think in an agile way about everything.

Products have customers. Products are the result of a product-development team’s work. You will release products. You can decide if there is more value in releasing a product now or waiting until later based on what the company wants and the customers need.

Beware of Initiatives
	I know of some organizations that use the word initiative instead of project. Many of them forgot that they had to release the project. They were great at starting, not so good at finishing. Remember that projects finish. They either release or they stop. But they don’t wander around in the desert, looking for the promised land.

Product is a useful word, especially in the context of agile approaches. Thinking about “product” helps you focus on who will use your product and how you will help those customers receive the product.

How often could you release your product? Thinking about how the organization releases the product helps the team start with the end in mind.

Every decision would be easier if there were just two kinds of products: those that released continuously, as in software as a service, and those that released infrequently, as in hardware. However, you might be in an organization where—for any number of reasons—it’s difficult and/or costly to release often. There’s a continuum of release frequency, as illustrated by the following diagram.

If your product is totally digital or software as a service, you could release continuously because the cost of release is low—or could be low. That’s because if you can get to frictionless releasing, you only have to worry if there is a business decision for releasing.

If your product has hardware or mechanical components for the product, the cost of release is high. You would not release as often as several times a day. I doubt you would release the entire product even monthly. You might release internally often—and use release criteria to know when the cost of release is worth it to the organization.

You might find that you have a better idea about the overall project risks when you consider how the product could release, not necessarily how it releases now.