Managing increments is at the core of agile product delivery. Agile practitioners must ensure that each product increment — whether it’s a software feature, a working prototype, or a business capability — is valuable, aligned with business goals, and delivered in a way that supports learning and adaptation.
Task 2, “Manage Increments,” centers on delivering working, valuable slices of the product at regular intervals and using them to validate progress, gather feedback, and steer future development. The PMI Agile Practice Guide, particularly in Sections 5.4 and 5.6, emphasizes iterative development, early feedback, and the inspection-adaptation loop, all of which are essential to effective increment management.
Enabler 1: Ensure Increment Is Aligned With Business Priorities
To maximize impact, each increment delivered by the team must contribute directly to a business goal or stakeholder need. This requires constant collaboration between the product owner, business stakeholders, and development team to understand shifting priorities and adjust work accordingly.
Agile leaders promote alignment by facilitating backlog grooming sessions, stakeholder reviews, and cross-functional planning discussions. Tools such as impact mapping, user story mapping, and value stream alignment help visualize how each increment supports organizational objectives.
Without alignment, teams risk delivering functionality that is technically sound but irrelevant, wasting time and resources. Regular validation with stakeholders ensures that work remains focused on outcomes that matter.
Enabler 2: Define the Increment Goals
Clearly defined goals for each increment help teams understand what they are trying to achieve beyond just completing tasks. Increment goals provide focus, guide sprint planning, and support effective measurement of progress.
A strong increment goal is specific, achievable within the iteration, and linked to a user or business outcome — for example, “Enable users to recover passwords via email” or “Reduce checkout time by 15%.”
Agile teams establish these goals during sprint planning and use them to drive discussion during the daily stand-up and retrospective. The product owner and Scrum Master collaborate to ensure goals are well understood and realistic.
Teams that skip goal-setting or use overly vague goals may struggle with prioritization, lose sight of value, and find it difficult to evaluate progress. Anchoring the team’s work to a tangible objective fosters ownership and transparency.
Enabler 3: Demonstrate Increments of Value for Early Feedback
Frequent delivery of working product increments allows stakeholders to review real functionality, provide feedback, and influence the next steps. This principle is at the heart of empirical process control — delivering, inspecting, and adapting.
Agile teams demonstrate increments during sprint reviews, product demos, or user testing sessions. These sessions should go beyond “show and tell” to actively engage stakeholders, clarify assumptions, and gather reactions.
Early feedback often reveals new needs, usability concerns, or business shifts — enabling the team to pivot before significant investment is made in the wrong direction. For example, a stakeholder might request a minor UI tweak that greatly improves usability — a change that’s easy early, but expensive later.
If teams delay feedback or present only partial or internal results, the opportunity for real learning is lost. Demonstrations should be working, testable, and focused on the value delivered.
Enabler 4: Measure the Delivery of Value
Measuring value ensures that the team’s efforts are producing meaningful results. Agile practitioners collaborate with stakeholders to define value criteria — which may include customer satisfaction, ROI, product adoption, or cycle time reduction.
Teams may use metrics such as lead time, velocity, net promoter score (NPS), business outcome tracking, or value points (relative value assigned to backlog items). The focus is on outcomes — not just output.
For example, releasing a feature that allows mobile check-in for flights can be measured in terms of increased adoption, reduced check-in times, and fewer service desk calls.
Agile leaders help avoid vanity metrics (e.g., lines of code or story points completed) and focus on metrics that drive learning and strategic alignment. These metrics are reviewed regularly and used to adapt the product roadmap and delivery strategy.
Summary Points
- Each increment should support clear business priorities and deliver value.
- Increment goals provide focus and context for each iteration.
- Demonstrating real, working product increments enables early feedback and learning.
- Measuring value shifts attention from effort to impact — enabling smarter decisions.
- Agile teams must continuously align, inspect, and adapt their increments based on stakeholder input and market changes.
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