The art of product planning is to uncover what you need to build to the best product you can with the resources available to you - it's a balancing act. What makes this challenging is that essential requirements are often missed along the way. We'd like to avoid making major changes to our products late in the day and risk compromising the quality and integrity of our product. Taking an agile approach enables us to deliver incrementally, realising value at the earliest opportunity. An agile approach also enables us learn from each delivery and use this feedback to make a better product. As we practice frequent delivery, we also gain vital experience in our team capability to deliver - helping out team balance what's desired against what's realistically possible.
Where many teams struggle in applying an Agile approach to product planning is that traditional requirements analysis techniques don't seem to apply. Agile teams evolve requirements through meetings and aim to keep documentation to a minimum. Applying a lightweight approach looks easy but requires different skills. I often see teams in suffering long unstructured meetings trying to work with requirements written up in ways that don't help the team figure out what to build.
Discover to Deliver is a wonderful guide for teams who are new to an Agile approach that gives you practical tools to enrich your product backlog as a team. This book will help you discover dimensions of requirements that are not easily represented as user stories and at risk of being overlooked. The authors are experienced facilitators and unlike many books that focus on artefacts, they get to the heart of how you evolve them. You will learn how to bring structure to your conversations with tips on practical details, such as what questions to ask and how to document what you've learned.
What I like about this book is how carefully it has been put together making the contents easy to consume, each concept is illustrated with sketches and examples. The authors have clearly applied their own advice in creating a book that is pared down to valuable techniques and easy to navigate using the progress bar along the top of each page.
As an agile coach this book is great to give to new product owners. If they already have experience with traditional requirements analysis, they will find within the pages how these can be adapted for agile teams. But if they're new to requirements analysis and trying to fit everything into user stories, this book will open their eyes to dimensions of the product that they may have been struggling to express to the team.
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