Whole Product Focus

Customers don’t buy a part of the product, but the whole product. This seems obvious but it is important to remember. It leads to a couple of important guidelines:

• Parts of software that are not integrated into the whole product have no value yet.
• Teams who finished ‘their part’ are not done until it is integrated.
• Whenever there is a choice to optimize a team output or the whole product, we always chose the whole product.

In many large product development groups, getting everyone to focus on the whole product instead of their individual parts/tasks/specialization is one of the hardest parts of scaling Scrum.

Always keep a whole product focus, keep reminding everyone there is no value in separate parts or half-working parts.

This principle suggests the application of Systems Thinking