In today’s agile world, true value isn’t just about speed—it’s about ensuring every increment drives measurable outcomes. Achieving this demands stronger alliances between business, IT, and stakeholders, focused on value-driven goals and seamless delivery. By collaborating closely, defining clear targets, and building a high-quality, rapid-release machine, we can unlock the next level of agility. Here’s how.
In a previous post “Value, Value, Value! The Businesslike Agility” we stressed the importance of pushing the accelerator towards a more Businesslike agility, while developing a true obsession towards value.
Moving in that directions means to rely on these six core principles as a necessary switch from “just delivering stuff” to create actual value continuously:
- Sitting with the Business
- Define a Value Cadence
- Leading by Value
- Flexible Goal Setting Approach
- Frequent, High-Quality Delivery
- Building a Value-Driven Agile Culture
We need to shift from merely asking “What are we building?” to “What value are we creating?”
1. Sitting with the Business
Every initiative begins with an idea. Transforming that idea into real impact that achieves meaningful outcomes means, first of all, to sit down with business stakeholders, early on, by answering some essential questions:
- Why does this initiative matter?
- What concrete value do we expect it to deliver?
- By when?
- How will we measure it?
- How frequently we can measure it?
- How we could say we reached the ROI / Objectives?
This engagement is critical because it allows us to define value in terms that are both specific and measurable.
Without these conversations, Agile Teams can quickly lose sight of the larger business impact, focusing on delivering features without a clear link to outcomes.
We need to shift from merely asking “What are we building?” to “What value are we creating?” This focus on the why has to guide every sprint, every decision, always aligned with the organization’s mission and goals.
2. Define a Value Cadence
One of the greatest challenges in agile value creation is aligning the cadence of value measurement with the rhythm of agile delivery.
In agile, we should deliver increments frequently, but the full realization of value may only appear over a longer horizon. This mismatch can create a sense of disconnection.
Agile Teams delivering increments may feel they’re moving fast, but if we can’t measure the impact of those increments, who knows if we are actually making any business progress at all?
To bridge this gap, we need to establish a cadence for measuring value that aligns with agile delivery. This could mean setting shorter-term timeboxes and regularly checking-in on “interim” indicators.
When we bring the business into these discussions, we can agree on the frequency and the criteria for measuring value, allowing us to measure progress incrementally and make any possible corrections early.
3. Leading by Value
As mentioned above, in some cases, the full realization of value might occur far from the moment an agile team delivers an increment.
For example, if a feature is intended to improve customer satisfaction, we may only see that satisfaction increasing months after release. In such situations, we need to look for proxies—early indicators that can help us kind of predicting whether we’re on the right track or not.
This is where leading and lagging indicators become essential:
- Leading Indicators: like customer engagement or usage rates, offer real-time insights that can serve as proxies for longer-term outcomes.
- Lagging Indicators: such as revenue growth or customer retention, actually capture the full impact, but they often appear too late to guide agile teams effectively in steering the delivery.
Think of Leading Indicators as the smoke that signals a fire (Lagging Indicator). The smoke gives you an early sign before the full impact of the fire is visible.
By tracking both types of indicators, we can make better-informed decisions that help us steer towards value, even when the ultimate outcome is still on the horizon.
4. Flexible Goal Setting Approach
OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) provide a powerful framework to define value in agile settings while specifying when it has been achieved.
Through OKRs, we can set clear objectives for our strategy, specifying the value it aims to deliver, and identify key results that serve as indicators of progress. By selecting leading indicators as key results, we can measure value far in advance and in alignment with the agile cadence.
OKRs help us focus on outcomes rather than just outputs.
To better understand the power of OKR let’s see a simple example. If the objective is to “Delight our users by deepening their connection with our platform“, the team might set key results like:
- Achieve a 20% increase in weekly active users
- Improve feature usage rates by 15% within the next quarter
- Collect feedback from 50 users within a month
They encourage teams to go beyond feature completion and consider the impact of their work.
For example, if our objective is to increase user engagement, we might set key results that measure user login rates, feature usage, or feedback scores. Each key result gives us a way to track incremental progress towards the ultimate goal.
When used well, and this is not given, OKRs transform the conversation from “Are we done with this feature?” to “Are we creating value?”
This shift in focus fosters a sense of purpose within teams and brings transparency to how every increment contributes to the bigger picture.
5. Frequent, High-Quality Delivery
To measure value frequently and rely on leading indicators, we must be able to release to production frequently—and with impeccable quality.
This requires a robust, nearly flawless delivery machine which relies on a strong DevOps foundation.
With DevOps practices, we can automate testing, streamline deployments, and create a seamless path to production, ensuring that every release is fast, reliable, and low-risk.
Continuous delivery and deployment are the pillars that support agile value creation. They allow teams to release small increments without disruption, reducing the time between delivery and feedback.
This rapid cycle of feedback enables teams ensuring that we’re always moving toward the highest value possible by:
- validating assumptions,
- refinining solutions,
- and pivoting if necessary..
For DevOps to be effective in this role, it must be deeply embedded in the team’s DNA.
6. Building a Value-Driven Agile Culture
We think that creating and frequently measuring value is the true north of Modern Agility.
It’s what drives every sprint, every increment, and every OKR we set: it demands a culture that puts value at the center of every conversation and decision.
To build this culture, we must bring the business into the agile process, align on what value means, how it will be measured, and then develop a cadence for tracking progress, building a delivery machine that ensures quality, reliability, and speed.
By aligning agile practices with the aforementioned principles, we can really bring agility as a true driver of actual business value creation.
