Transitioning from Projects to Products

For years our work life has focused around projects, and the associated dates and deliverables we inevitably are late or even fail to deliver. This is understandable, really. We've been conditioned by our histories of IT projects  long ramp-up, big push, go-live, and on to the next thing! This project-based view has disincentivized our teams to focus on things like maintainability and thoughtful instrumentation of real product to understand how the experience can be improved over time. But our industry, especially due to the growth of mobile applications, is wired very differently today. Today if we are not thinking continuous delivery of real business value, we will rapidly fall behind our competition and eventually fail without corrective action.

Agile allows us to focus on something more important; product delivery. In practice, we need product managers, steady funding, the ability to track key metrics, and dedicated, long-lived development teams; not transient teams that come together briefly and then disband (its hard for developers to care about a product if they're constantly jumping from one project to the next).

In this talk, we will be discussing the changes that need to be made and how you can help your organization transition to a true product delivery mindset.

In this talk you will learn:

• How to recognize the pain points of projects and how to overcome them with product thinking
• The difference between project delivery and product delivery
• The reasons why project delivery is not as critical as product delivery
• Why it is critical for teams and their leaders to look further than this current project