It is no longer a debate that successful organizations and teams focus on outcomes, not just the output. However, it is quite easy to say and accept this; adopting and implementing it is a considerable challenge. Dual-track agile is an approach that provides one way to embrace the outcome-based mindset and framework.
Let us understand the mindset with examples of two teams.
Team A meets to decide what work they will focus on for the next few days. If you are using Scrum, this can be your next Sprint. The team is considering the Sprint Reviews and customers’ feedback. One of the feedback is that the users are not very satisfied with the reports and analytics that the product provides. The team has collected a few details about what the users would like to see, and they have decided they will implement five new reports at the end of the Sprint.
Team B is also working on a similar product, and they, too, have got similar feedback. However, team B has decided to go deep into the input and invited some users to discuss it. Through the discussions and question-answers, Team B has gathered more insights. While there were a few areas where the team could improve the reporting and analytics aspects, they decided to focus on the cost management part based on prioritization. Their goal was to enable customers to save costs. In the end, in addition to the current reports showing where the expenses were taking place, the team implemented reports to show the expenditure patterns and some recommendations to save the costs.
It is clear which approach you, as a customer, would prefer.
Table of Contents
Current Agile Processes
Whichever team you are, think about how you will implement these processes with any agile frameworks. Whether you use Scrum, Kanban, or anything else, there will typically be at least two phases, Discovery & Development/Delivery. First, the Product Manager and Designers would participate in discovery and decide what features/user stories you should deliver to customers first based on priorities. Then the development teams would work on those features/stories, which they will provide to the users at some point.
You must have realized by now that this is the waterfall approach with at least two stages.
Challenges of Current Processes
The current processes are still sequential. It poses the following challenges;
1. The time taken from the start of the discovery to the delivery may be too long, delaying the customer’s feedback and validation of the development.
2. The hand-offs between the discovery and the delivery team may dilute the requirements, and certain aspects may get lost in the translation.
3. Depending upon the time taken for the entire cycle, certain assumptions or requirements may even become invalid by the time delivery takes place.
What is Dual-track Agile
Dual-track agile approach attempts to the cycle time and lead time for the entire value delivery. Teams adopting the dual-track agile have both, Discovery track & delivery track in parallel. This parallel approach allows them to deliver faster while ensuring all the requirements are met.
Dual-track agile is an approach to software development that emphasizes user experience and engineering activities. It comprises two parallel development tracks, the “discovery” track, and the “delivery” track. The discovery track focuses on user experience design and research, while the delivery track focuses on engineering activities such as coding and testing. This approach allows teams to respond quickly to customer needs while ensuring high-quality results. This flexibility will enable teams to rapidly develop, test and deploy solutions quickly while allowing for customer feedback and iteration to ensure that the result is of the highest quality. As a result, dual-track agile is becoming increasingly popular and is an effective way to ensure efficient and effective software development.
Discovery track
The discovery track is focused on exploring and discovering potential solutions to customer problems, and the other is focused on delivering working software incrementally. Discovery track activities typically include customer research and user interviews, prototyping, usability testing, and market analysis to validate assumptions. During the discovery track, teams use lightweight research and experiments to determine the viability of a product or service idea. This approach helps teams quickly uncover customer needs and design effective solutions.
Delivery track
By combining the two tracks of discovery and delivery, dual-track agile allows teams to focus on customer needs and technical feasibility in parallel. In addition, this process helps to identify unknowns and risks early in the project to ensure optimal value delivery.
The delivery track focuses on delivering the highest value features to customers as quickly as possible. It also allows constant feedback from customers and stakeholders to ensure that all delivered features are of the highest quality. This constant feedback helps ensure that the development team is working on the highest priority items and can respond to customer feedback promptly.
While there are two parallel tracks, everyone on the product team participates in all the activities. For example, developers are part of all the discovery activities, including ideation and prototyping. In contrast, the discovery team is part of development activities ensuring the proper implementation and quality.
Advantages of Dual-track Agile
Dual-track agile helps you with the convergence of the discovery and development processes. It allows teams to explore, validate and develop new products and services simultaneously while delivering value to their customers. Advantages of dual-track agile include;
1. improved team members’ collaboration, faster market time, and reduced risk.
2. With dual-track agile, teams can work on exploration and delivery simultaneously, leading to more efficient use of resources.
3. This approach also allows teams to build a feedback loop that can be used to improve products and services continuously.
4. Additionally, dual-track agile helps teams to understand customer needs better and respond faster to changes in user behavior. The speed helps ensure that teams build valuable solutions for customers.
Critical Factors For Adoption of Dual-Track Agile Approach
While there can be many challenges in adopting the dual-track approach, including mindset challenges or lack of management buy-in, we will focus on the challenges you might face with the actual implementation and leave such external factors for some other day.
1. The team still considers the work siloed. Developers think the discovery team and product managers are responsible for understanding and validating the requirements. The discovery team feels that once they have formulated the requirements, it is up to the developers to deliver them. For the dual-track approach to work, everyone must be involved in all the activities and be responsible for the outcome. Yes, different people will lead in different scenarios, but responsibility and contribution will be required from everyone on this cross-functional team.
2. The work is not divided into small enough chunks. For the feedback loop to be effectively small, the sizing of the work unit is appropriately sized. It should not be larger than necessary, and at the same time, it can not be so small that the customer feedback may not matter.
3. Speed is the key, not perfection. That should be okay if you can build something enough to get valuable customer feedback through actual usage. Implementing the feature, story, or product backlog items can be perfected later (more on that later), but validating product ideas through user feedback as quickly as possible is critical.
Is This Only Applicable To Scrum?
Scrum, the most-adopted and cadence-based framework, can see drastic improvements in outcomes (not necessarily outputs) using the dual-track Agile process. However, Kanban, which follows a flow-based approach, may still have sequential and siloed aspects present. Even Kanban (or any other framework/methodology) can benefit from the dual-track approach if that’s the case.
Conclusion
True agility comes from effective collaboration and continuous discovery & delivery. Dual track agile approach enables both these and allows the teams to focus on the outcome-based mindset, ensuring that your customers get value from your product development efforts.
However, this approach requires significant effort to succeed. As is with any approach, think deeply about your context and the problem you are trying to solve. If the dual-track approach has the potential to solve your problem, then only adopt it after carefully planning for the implementation. After all, you must keep outcomes in your mind, whether developing the products or implementing a way of working.
Additional Reading: Jeff Patton is the one who has written extensively about the Dual-Track approach. Please find many of the articles he has written on the topic here.
