The Concept of Interleaving
Key Terms: Strategic vs Tactical; Prioritisation; Decompose & Break-down; Product vs Tech; Tech Strategy Execution.
This concept is related to decomposing problems, balancing tactical & strategic prioritisation, planning and execution, avoiding big "Either-Or" prioritisation dilemmas and maximising value creation.
Our agile ways of working, with some form of Product Owner role setting and managing the direction and prioritisation of team efforts, are generally more geared to establishing user needs, market opportunities and working in an iterative & incremental development and delivery manner. As such, strategic business initiatives that get delivered by agile teams need to be managed in a similar way, to avoid their progress getting blocked by the more tactical or product strategy only work items.
These strategic initiatives need to be managed in the same manner as a product strategy is executed, supported with the same level of effort, processes and practices to understand, decompose and prioritise the work as the user-centric product work items are, in standard Agile Product & Software Development.
The first step is recognising that this isn't happening. The next step is to mirror the product development practices.
