How to bust silos, supercharge collaboration and unleash developer potential
There’s this team building a new product, and it’s a real head-scratcher — complex and all over the place. They need to figure things out, build, and change direction fast. There’s just one Product Manager or Business Analyst leading the team, along with a Tech Team Leader. These guys are overloaded, handling pretty much all the feasibility and viability stuff themselves. This leaves the developers feeling disconnected from the customer and feel like they’re just churning out code.
“While Agile methodologies have brought significant improvements, many organisations are still struggling to realise their full potential.”
A Digital.ai survey revealed that while 71% of software developers use Agile methodologies, only 44% believe it’s truly effective in their organisations. This discrepancy often stems from a lack of end-to-end visibility, leaving developers feeling disconnected from the bigger picture and hindering their sense of ownership.
The clash between our Waterfall-influenced planning and our Agile execution is creating a bottleneck, stalling progress and frustrating the team.
One of the approaches that can help is introducing Epic ownership model which empowers developers to act more as strategic contributors by ‘owning’ Epics (features, sub-features) within the team from an early stage in the product lifecycle. This means developers moving beyond simply executing tasks and embracing a more proactive role in the product development lifecycle. It also helps grow developers into well rounded technologists, enhancing their consulting and leadership skills. Think of this as developing many ‘captains’ in the team. Ultimately this helps counter the risk of de-motivation, drives better collaboration and faster feedback loops thus delivering a better product.
