Once, in an Agile Mentors live Q&A, someone asked me: How important is it for agile teams to define the specific problem that they’re trying to solve?
I thought that was an interesting question. My initial response was to say that it is super important.
As Yogi Berra said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll probably end up somewhere else.”
So yes, often, it is important for a team to know which specific problem it wants to solve.
Then again, as Gandalf from The Lord of the Rings said, “Not all who wander are lost.” I’m very open to the idea that when we start out a project we might not know the exact problem at first. We might wander around a bit before we discover it.
Take game studios, for example. Game studios often divide their work into phases of pre-production and production. So if you’re observing teams working in a game studio, you will notice a change: the team goes from “We’re trying to figure out what we’re building” to “We know what we’re building, we just have to make more of it.” Maybe they need to add more levels or monsters to the game. At that point, they’re in production mode.
But during pre-production, you’ll hear them use the phrase, “Find the fun,” meaning—what will be uniquely fun about this particular game that will make it valuable?
That same thinking applies in business apps, except that we ask, “Where’s the value?” meaning, what will be unique about this product or feature that will make it worth creating?
So I don’t think a team always needs to start off knowing the precise problem it’s trying to solve. Sometimes a team needs to explore the solution space to figure out the unique value. It’s important to do this quickly, though, to succeed with agile,
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