A specific Obeya for agile Product Development

In agile product development, the ability to respond flexibly and effectively to changing requirements and challenges is paramount. This is particularly true in software development, which is our focus for this approach.

Traditional Obeya rooms have long been a proven tool to promote transparency, collaboration, and rapid decision-making. Obeya is visualization. To harness these inherent advantages, we have designed a complete visual language for agile product development, which integrates seamlessly into Obeya.

Our Vision

“Our vision is to establish
an Obeya room as the central hub for
fully visual method-based product development.”

We aim to create not just a room that serves as a visual control center for agile product development, but also to consolidate ALL necessary tools as visual methods for managing this process within a logically structured framework. This room will offer transparency and serve as a lively space for collaboration across all levels of product development. Such spaces ensure access to all relevant, interconnected information, enhance understanding through visual representation, and thereby facilitate both quick and well-founded decision-making.

The primary goal: ensuring continuous value development for the organization and the customer. This should resonate with anyone who is responsible for product development. Our target audience includes:

• Obeya practitioners (Hosts, Builders) or Coaches (Kanban, Visual, or Agile Coaches) looking to leverage Obeya specifically for agile product development.
• Product Owners, Managers, and Executives aiming to create transparency in their projects and work more efficiently through visual methods.

The Unique Features of an Obeya Room for Agile Product Development

Below, we present five key aspects and corresponding visual methods that have proven successful in our agile product development practice. We chose these five categories because they represent the areas that are often problematic in product development:

1) High-Level Overview: A quick overview, such as a Product Development Canvas, serves as the starting point for product development and is continuously refined. Bullet points outlining key areas of product development are expanded into meaningful visual tools. The Canvas then evolves into a table of contents and guide within the Obeya. Product Vision, Impact Mapping, and System Context Diagrams are typical high-level overviews.

Problem Addressed: The issue is often not a lack of information but inconsistency, outdated content, or missing links between them. For Example: A client project revealed that the connection between business goals and system boundaries only became clear through visual representation. Although all relevant information was present, no one had an overarching view. By combining the mentioned visual overviews, we maintained reciprocal clarity throughout the project, aligning management, product teams, and technical frameworks.

2) Strategy and Alignment: An agile Obeya room bridges the gap between operational execution and the strategic direction of the company. This integration allows teams and leaders to keep long-term goals in focus and ensure that all decisions are aligned with the overall vision and mission. Central to this approach are regular synchronizations across various layers of information—from strategic planning to operational execution. Visual tools like the Visual Vision Metaphor, Visual Strategy Map, and even a Wardley Map for strategic analysis of the solution are key components. Visualized metrics and dashboards further complement this process, making progress visible in real-time, especially concerning customer feedback and outcome-based metrics.

Problem Addressed: Strategic goal alignment is essential to product development, but it’s often lacking between executives, product managers, and technical teams, or not clearly communicated. This misalignment causes a loss of focus, inefficient use of resources, and a lack of motivation. By using visual methods, such as the Visual Strategy Map and Vision Metaphor, we were able to make the goals and strategies of different stakeholders visible. This helped to resolve contradictions and align the teams around common objectives. The continuous integration of feedback from visualized metrics ensured that decision-making was based on real-time progress and customer outcomes.

3) Collaboration & Improvement: A clear overview of responsibilities and dependencies between teams is crucial in the Obeya. Dependencies, team responsibilities, and ongoing improvement initiatives are visually mapped, allowing blockages and bottlenecks to be identified and resolved quickly. Teams and leadership gain a clear view of collaboration across the organization, which is particularly important when dealing with interdependencies between different projects or teams. This is achieved through visual tools like the People & Interactions Map, which is directly linked to the Stakeholder Map. Cross-team improvement initiatives are mapped out in an Improvements Map, ensuring synergies are realized and redundant efforts avoided.

Problem Addressed: In one company we worked with, many employees were part of multiple teams with different responsibilities, leading to inefficiencies, miscommunication, and even burnout. By visually representing the team compositions, responsibilities, and interdependencies using a People & Interactions Map, we could make these inefficiencies visible. This enabled targeted improvements, reducing miscommunication and fostering better collaboration between teams. The ongoing improvements were managed through an Improvements Map, which helped align initiatives across teams and avoid duplication of efforts.

4) Focusing on User Perspective: To ensure that product development remains focused on delivering maximum customer value — which in turn drives organizational value — it’s essential to use artifacts that visualize customer problems and scenarios. Visual User Stories, User Journey Maps, and even Wireframe Galleries make the user perspective visible and connect it directly to the solution space. These artifacts are placed in direct proximity to delivery planning, ensuring that user needs are always at the forefront of development.

Problem Addressed: Many teams start development based on long to-do lists or detailed specifications, which can stifle creativity and miss the real user needs. In one software development case, the team followed detailed specifications without questioning the actual customer problems. As a result, the final product did not meet user needs. By introducing Visual User Stories, we shifted the focus back to the customer’s perspective, reducing the reliance on upfront specifications and improving the quality of test cases. The close interaction between the visual tools and the team fostered better understanding, minimized misunderstandings, and improved team motivation.

5) Planning, Execution, and Delivery: A critical element of agile product development is the focus on delivering increments and intermediate results. In Obeya, teams can ensure continuous delivery by visualizing increments and milestones, always keeping the user perspective in mind. Feedback from each delivery is made visible immediately in the room, allowing for timely adjustments. Both technical and organizational solutions are displayed transparently, ensuring alignment with the overall goals. Common agreements, such as a unified Definition of Done (DoD), are visible in the room. The ongoing work and incremental deliveries are captured in a Story Map, synchronized with the agile roadmap and the overall product strategy.

Problem Addressed: Even when there is alignment between strategy and operations, the challenge remains in delivering a product that addresses the most urgent customer needs as quickly as possible. By combining the Visual Strategy Map, Visual User Stories, and mapping them to the Story Map, we were able to generate tangible deliveries and significantly reduce time-to-market. This allowed the team to stay focused on value-driven outcomes, with real-time feedback incorporated into each stage of the process.

Applying Visual Product Ownership in Obeya

This approach is summarized under the term “Visual Product Ownership.” The visual methods are logically organized within the Obeya and foster knowledge sharing across all levels of the organization. The following figure shows the allocation of the five categories within the Obeya. (Since the implementation may take place in team rooms, the number 5 appears twice.)

Typical Challenges in Everyday Work

Regardless of the roles and methods used, understanding the current status of all tasks and their interdependencies is often one of the biggest challenges. Visualizations are a crucial tool for making complex relationships more understandable. Visual representations promote shared understanding and can enable innovations that would be difficult to imagine without this clarity. The Visual Product Ownership approach takes advantage of this by offering pre-configured visual solutions for common requirements while reducing unnecessary complexity.

By utilizing the connections between the overarching corporate goals and the operational implementations, which are integrated into the Obeya from the very beginning, along with appropriate measurement methods and criteria, a highly effective tool is created — one that continually amplifies its impact.

Agreements and Information Flow

A room alone is not sufficient — clear agreements must be made to ensure that the information in this space is actually used as a basis for decision-making. Representatives from management and teams need to commit to collaborating in this central space and to regularly updating the artifacts within it, as these serve as their working foundation. Shadow information that arises elsewhere should be avoided. Regular updates, both formal and informal, ensure continuous exchange and adjustment of the content. All key artifacts are collected and organized here, allowing information to be quickly accessed and used in meetings and daily stand-ups. The Obeya room is where teams meet, plan together, and clarify contexts and relationships. The Obeya room is the heart of Visual Product Ownership, i.e., development using fully visual methods. The visual artifacts representing the five key aspects, placed side by side in the room, promote knowledge sharing at all levels of the organization.

Step-by-Step Obeya Development

As mentioned earlier, the Obeya is built gradually, with content sketched out in the Product Development Canvas being expanded into more detailed visual methods. The five areas are built up step by step and then continuously refined.

For a detailed description how to evolve from a small project room to a fully developed Obeya goes beyond the scope of this article. Visit our talk at the Obeya Summit 2024 or participate in one of our training sessions! These training sessions are offered in cooperation between Viable Projects (Dieter) and ri:level (Olaf).

More information from Dieter can be found here:

• German webpage about Obeya: https://www.viableprojects.eu/training#obeya
• Obeya-training schedule: https://www.viableprojects.eu/termine/obeya
• LinkedIn-Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/strasserd/
• German LinkedIn Group “OrganisierenMitObeya”: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/12903051/
• German LinkedIn Newsletter: https://www.linkedin.com/build-relation/newsletter-follow?entityUrn=7031652002765942785
• German Blog: https://www.viableprojects.eu/blog

And more from Olaf here:

• Visual-ProductOwnership.de
• Additionally, his book Agile Product Development with Visual Methods will be published in February 2025 by dPunkt-Verlag (initially in German only).

https://dpunkt.de/produkt/agile-produktentwicklung-mit-visuellen-methoden/

• I am also happy about networking and get in contact via LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/%E2%9C%8F%EF%B8%8Folaf-bublitz-2b86b1180/