Dual-Track Agile, to create a culture of innovation
Dual-Track, created by Jeff Patton, and popularised afterward as dual-track agile by Marty Cagan in his well-known “Inspired”, is a process to create products that follow the philosophy of creating products should be a cyclical approach instead of a linear one.
In that means, I bet we all have seen the model most agencies use: A product owner crating requirements (having a hard time to understand the business), to then pass them to the product designers, who most probably have a hard time understanding what is written and why, to then pass the designs to the developers, who don’t ask ‘why’ in some cases, and develop what is “defined” in the user story. I’m sure all of you remember the Chinese whispers children’s game?, the game stems from the supposed confused messages created when a message was passed verbally from tower to tower along the Great wall of China. Curiously similar?. this obviously is not new, and it is the perfect recipe for failure.
Dual-track agile, actually focus on keeping the team informed so they can make better decisions while building a product. It suggests running and synchronise two tracks in parallel. The discovery track, and the delivery track.
But how it works?
Discovery Track:
Key Roles: Product Manager, Product Design, Tech lead (Product trio)
Key Responsibilities:
Collect ideas (Market research, competitor analysis, stakeholder interviews), and create and maintain an ideas backlog.
Prioritise the ideas backlog and produce prototypes (measurable experiments).
Conduct user testing (user interviews, surveys, A/B).
Perform Design Spikes (More on this topic in my next article).
Move validated experiments to the product backlog.
Delivery Track:
Key Roles: Product Manager, Tech lead, Development Team.
Key Responsibilities:
Maintain the product backlog.
Develop the product.
Conduct user testing iteratively.
Benefits of using it
Benefits are multiple, but primarily, for organisations/agencies that develop products in a “waterfoolish” way, (discovery first, and then delivery), Dual-track agile proposes some key concepts that not only bring benefits for the product being built, but the organisational culture afterward. Teams involved in the process start to own concepts such as, experimentation, success metrics, measure what should be measured, talk with the users often, rapid prototyping, product-trío synergy, and dev team empowerment and ownership, I mean at the end of the day it is expected that the dev team can make decisions too, that creates the magic.
Key takeaways
Highly-motivated teams: At the end of the day motivation is key to be a creator, I mean, when putting something into the world that wasn’t there yet. A team that is motivated, make decisions, start discussions, challenge decisions, and work on a positive note. The good thing about motivation, is that will infect other teams in the organisation/agency to take ownership over the process and tasks, I’ve seen it myself.
Impacts the organisational culture: It is the first glance of a culture of experimentation, in which, teams rapid-prototype experiments (losing the sense of marrying with them), measure them, perform research, and learn what is worth building and what’s not.
Start small: It is a method that needs to be orchestrated to work. So, I’ll suggest starting small.
First, finding common ground with the team (I developed a workshop to role-play with the team and generate internal, and external buy-in),
Then, setting a lean plan, to then measure and learn about the process is key.
