{"id":1824,"date":"2013-06-02T14:43:42","date_gmt":"2013-06-02T14:43:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/actuationconsulting.com\/new\/?p=1824"},"modified":"2016-01-01T13:37:04","modified_gmt":"2016-01-01T19:37:04","slug":"a-hybrid-approach-to-the-product-lifecycle-by-steven-starke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/actuationconsulting.com\/a-hybrid-approach-to-the-product-lifecycle-by-steven-starke\/","title":{"rendered":"A Hybrid Approach to the Product Lifecycle by Steven Starke"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the past several years, there has been a movement in the information technology industry to adopt better, faster, and cheaper ways to implement solutions. This movement is typically synonymous with Agile and Lean development methodologies. The movement has crossed over into the product development industry as well, as technology is being used to further advance customer-driven solutions. However, I\u2019m finding more and more product development practitioners struggling to balance their efforts to create value, grow their products, execute consistently, as they also try to marry up Agile and Lean development with other product development methodologies and frameworks like Pragmatic\u00a0and Phase Gate\u2019s\u00a0<\/span>product lifecycle. \u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In addition, each methodology and framework seems to come with their own holy wars on which one is better, further confusing the situation. Although, I\u2019ve been a practitioner of Agile methodologies since 2002, I consider myself methodology agnostic. I consider any methodology a process-tool to be used in combination with other process tools to achieve the desired results. However, my observations over the years are now starting to be solidified by recent survey data being published throughout the industry.<\/p>\n

Specifically, over the past couple of years, Actuation Consulting<\/a> has been running a survey based on determining the ideal factors that affect product team performance. The results from the survey<\/a> indicate that, as more and more companies try to adopt Agile, they appear to be backing away<\/i> from \u201cpure\u201d Agile and evolving into<\/i> a more hybrid (Waterfall\/Agile mix) approach to product development. The time and effort to figure this out can be costly as teams experiment with trial and error approaches to customizations.<\/p>\n

Therefore, the goal of this blog post is twofold: One, I would like to discuss some of the data from the 2012 and 2013 survey\u2019s that back up these claims and, two, I want to introduce what this new evolved methodology might look like. First some statistics from the respondents of the survey:<\/p>\n