Profit is Sustainable Value, Part 1

Let’s move past platitudes that products must create value, obscured by many interpretations. Sustainable solutions generate PROFIT. Systematically.

Recently, I upgraded to a new smartphone and chose to manually download my apps again. Browsing to the bottom of my Android installation history was a nostalgic blast from the past. I’ve long forgotten many discontinued mobile games, tools and services. This begs the question: If these apps provided customer value through functional utility, why aren’t they still installable? Certainly, these apps had overcome engineering feasibility challenges and cracked usability hurdles to land on our devices many years ago.

Source: Jeff Patton Associates

Current notions of value neglect the bottom line

Let’s unpack the term value, which suffers from inflationary use and varying definitions. At its most basic level, Agile primarily views value in terms of customer satisfaction and delivering working software that meets customer needs efficiently. Agile promotes a steady development pace with continuous improvement through delivering value in iterations. The SAFe framework elevated the Agile concept of value to an enterprise level, focusing on delivering the most valuable products to the market continuously. It introduced Lean-Agile principles for aiming at long-term growth and operational efficiency, ensuring the organization's longevity and resilience. In the Scrum framework, Professional Agile Leadership and Evidence Based Management in particular, value is supposedly already delivered when users are happy and engaged with a product. It goes so far as to explicitly stipulate that the profitability of a product does not indicate if it provides value or not!

I beg to differ! As a product manager with past commercial responsibilities in multiple roles, it's safe to assume that none of these apps unlocked sustainability in the form of profit to invest in maintaining the product lifecycle. So much value, and still none of these apps are to be found on our phones? Obviously, we need to talk more about Business Agility. Too little attention is paid to the downstream value which providers of software enabled solutions should capture in order to not only survive, but to prosper and serve customers even better.


We'll get into that in Part 2 →