Traditional vs Agile Product Management: What’s the Difference?
Previously, we’ve shared an article that breaks down the benefits of agile and how you can start your agile transformation. However, how does agile product management compare to the traditional product management model? Let’s have a look in this article.
Traditional Product Management
Traditional product management aims at developing a full product through well defined stages, sequentially - where each stage can only start when the previous stage is done. In a typical setting, the stages will be analysis - design - development - testing - launch. This model is also well-known as the waterfall model due to its linear approach.
Traditional Product Management (Waterfall)
This traditional product management approach typically follows a long-term roadmap with an emphasis on fixed scope & timeline. Since the aim is to build the product in full, the whole lifecycle can often take months, or sometimes even more than a year to complete. If your product had 50 features to be developed, it will only launch when all 50 features are ready. In short, this model presents a detailed view of the product management plan from start to finish.
The PROBLEM With Traditional Product Management
Let’s say along the way as you build your product, the market changes, and the features that were designed based on what you know about the market at the start is no longer valid.
Imagine launching your product many months later only to realise that no one wants to use it. The cost of going back to the drawing board is very high and we would have lost a lot of time & money for development so far.
This is where agile product management comes into play.
Agile Product Management
In contrast to traditional product management which focuses on scope and timeline, agile product management focuses on using customer feedback to continually improve the product through short and incremental delivery cycles.
In agile, a product is broken down into smaller chunks and is delivered iteratively in increments. With every increment being an improved version of the one before. Every increment is done within a iteration that can last as short as 1 week. Before building an increment, the team will pick a subset of the full features to be delivered based on priority.
As an example, if your product had 50 features to be developed, you can focus on releasing the top 10 features first, and then the next 10, and we keep doing that until all 50 features are done.
Agile Product Management
During every iteration, analysis-development-testing-and deployment happen rapidly. At the end of every iteration, the team validates the increment to see If it performs as expected - in a sense that not only does all the features work, they also needs to be relevant to current situations. If this is true, then additional features are added to the next increment. In the event where there are market changes or any other factor that cause the software increment to be invalid, the team will analyse and adjust accordingly in the next increment.
So based on this comparison, we can start to see some of the advantages agile product management has over the traditional model.
By breaking the software into smaller chunks, agile product management lets you deliver and fail faster
The sooner we find out if you’ve built the right/wrong thing, the sooner you can decide on your next steps
By delivering core features first and releasing sooner, your clients can also enjoy the benefit of the software earlier
This means, you can also start generating income sooner
Summary
Here’s a table that summarise the difference between traditional product management (waterfall) with agile product management.
Traditional VS Agile Product Management
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