Consider the SaaS product development lifecycle. This is a simplified but illustrative model:
Strategy → Discovery → Development → Operations.
Each individual stage in this model is a discipline unto itself. Strategy is the domain of business
executives. Discovery is where product management shines. Development is where software developers
excel. And operations is where IT folks rule the day. This is a simplistic model; these boundaries
aren't rigid and there's overlap. Like all models, it's wrong — but it is also a useful in understanding
DiscoDev.
DiscoDev is born from the same observations that drove Patrick Debois to organize the first Devopsdays
in Belgium in 2009: to increase the flow of product development, silos must be bridged. DevOps built a
bridge between the development and operations disciplines. DiscoDev, likewise, is building a bridge
between discovery and development. It addresses the wall between the product management and software
development disciplines.
I know what you're thinking. "But Mike, there is no wall! For nearly a generation, agile has been
involving users and the business in the process!" And you're absolutely right. But, through no fault
of our own, the industry shifted. Agile, as described by the Agile Manifesto in 2001, solved problems
of the previous decade.
Agile has stagnated since then. Bob Martin, one of the Agile Manifesto's signatories,
recently asked "What happened to agile?"
Bob concludes that agile was the creation of technical people and co-opted by project managers. The
solution he offers is on the right track, but fails to address the more fundamental question: why?
Why was agile captured by project managers and turned into something less useful for where the industry
had shifted?
For the details of the forces at play, please reference
this post.
The TLDR is that agile solved for environments where users and customers were internal stakeholders.
In SaaS and mobile development, the customer shifted to entire markets. This was a fundamental shift,
and required teams to collaborate in entirely new ways to ensure value was being delivered. The Manifesto
rightfully states that they value
working software over comprehensive documentation. In SaaS and
mobile development, we value delivering outcomes over working software. And, as the Manifesto points out,
while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.