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Combine design thinking, lean startup, and agile? Beware of waterfall in disguise
A thought-provoking view on how 3, in themselves excellent concepts, combined can produce an opposite result than you were looking for.
If you have been walking around in the world of Agile and Scrum for a while like me, you might have run into this Gartner (2016)diagram a few times before. At least I see it being used in presentations more and more often.
The diagram combines ideas from Design Thinking, Lean Startup, and Agile, and to be honest, on the first impression I liked it. Looking at it the first time, I was really glad to see a major player like Garner embracing the combination of different approaches and practices instead of contrasting them.
With this first impression, I missed the underlying danger this diagram can provide when executed by inexperienced executors or could even be used (un)intentionally to make a charade of the organizational transition it is supposed to support and become a waterfall in disguise.
What’s wrong with it?
Reading the diagram it leads from ideation on the left to execution and delivery of the shippable product on the right. Being sliced into different phases it can give the executors of this overall process a misunderstood idea of a sequence of different sub-processes.
Each sub-process with its own specialists that work (all in their own silos) on internal feedback loops of continuous improvements. If the organization and implementation of this end-to-end process are set up wrong, only at the touchpoints there will be a collaboration between the sub-processes. Or even worse, the first sub-processes are staffed with“ Thinkers” and the last is staffed with “ Do-ers”.
3 pitfalls to a waterfall approach
- This gives the suggestion that the problem-solving phase can be done before execution and with that gives support to the typical waterfall paradigm of a big plan upfront.
