Making Products That Matter: How Value-driven Development Accelerates Your Teams

Abstract

An increasing number of businesses are seeking new Agile ways to deliver valuable products to their customers. However, many companies that adopt Agile principles soon experience early indicators of struggle, such as starting development before the value to the end user is fully understood or delivering products that are not done. These problems limit the ability of organizations to create value for both their end users and the company. The purpose of this article is to share our experience as practitioners on a range of Agile development practices from a value-driven perspective. Common blind spots are highlighted and the value-driven principles that enable development teams to sustainably create value are explained. Our experimentation with various improvement approaches has provided insight into value-driven principles and the framework that interconnects these principles. This article describes the value-driven framework (VDF) as a methodology developed by practitioners for businesses that struggle to enable their workforce to increase the value of their products. The VDF provides an approach to overcome these struggles in a four-step process: (1) explore to find opportunity, (2) discover the most valuable next step, (3) experiment to try-out and learn, and (4) value will emerge as a sustainable user benefit.