Sprint 34 :: Navigating Bureaucracy as a Product Individual in Agile Methodology
As we all know, the Agile methodologies revolutionized the tech environments, enabling teams to deliver high-quality products in an efficient way and enabling them to adapt to a customer first structure. However, working within a big company, agile as it may be, brings some bureaucratic organizational structure hardships that represent a couple of unique challenges for a Product person.
What are these challenges you ask? well:
Slow decision-making processes:
In some small companies and start-ups you discuss everything in a small table, and you feel like you are an MVP! However, in a big company, the decision process tends to have a lot of steps, you have to create a document to explain why you think this needs to be done, that document has to travel all the hierarchical ladder until someone says OK. This hinders the agility and responsiveness of an Agile product.
Alas it falls onto the Product person to expedite the bureaucratic stakeholders into making a decision, not always an easy task to be taken.
Lack of autonomy and trust:
Agile methodology empowers Product Owners to make critical decisions, but bureaucracy may restrict their autonomy and decision-making authority. Building trust and asking for more autonomy are crucial to overcome this challenge and effectively manage and prioritize your tasks. Just make sure to show that you deserve and are ready for that autonomy!
Overemphasis on documentation:
You should neither give into the dark side of the bureaucratic world, nor join the rebel alliance against it, rather try to merge both, get the best of both worlds, maintain the agility and iterative nature of Agile, and have the bit of bureaucracy that your company needs.
And now you ask, how can we solve this? Well, we at Product Land want to try and give some pointers, so here are a couple of solutions we can see:
Educate stakeholders about Agile:
Be nice while doing it, no one likes to be seen as not knowing something, but creating awareness and understanding of Agile among stakeholders is essential. We as Product persons should educate and demonstrate how Agile practices can align with the organization's goals and can lead to improved outcomes! Take that thing you thought about and show it to your manager, maybe it helps.
Building strong relationships with stakeholders:
Now now, we don’t mean that you should suck up to your boss, not at all, but developing strong relationships with stakeholders, including management and decision-makers, is crucial. It will help you build trust and open lines of communication that can help you gain some influence in decision-making and gain support for Agile practices.
Streamlining approval processes:
You are Product, you see the redundancies and the things that can be improved, help your team by Identifying opportunities to simplify and streamline bureaucratic approval processes. Eliminate redundant steps, leverage technology for efficient documentation, and explore automated approval systems where feasible.
Adapting Agile practices to fit bureaucratic requirements:
While maintaining the core principles of Agile, Product persons should adapt and tailor Agile practices to align with bureaucratic requirements. Finding common ground and compromise can help strike a balance between Agile flexibility and bureaucratic needs.
We wish you good luck in the journey to join bureaucracy and agile in the same world, don’t forget that you are not alone! you have both your team with you in this journey and the entire agile community! We are all together in the same boat. When the weight of bureaucracy becomes too much count on us all to help you out! Together we are stronger!
Now please fill in form 34-APO-999-XTR in order to get our traditional goodbye and to feal appreciated.
P.S.
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