Working Product over Comprehensive Documentation

Part 2 of a four-part series on the values of the Agile Manifesto, first published on LinkedIn.

The second statement of the Agile Manifesto goes hand in hand with startup culture. Startups are focused on building a product and getting it to customers, and the Manifesto says the same: working product should be prioritised over comprehensive documentation.

Documentation matters, up to a point

Documentation is, and will remain, a critical part of any organisation. People move on; documents stay. But more is not always merrier.

Over the last few decades, many organisations have grown to an unprecedented scale, and the importance of documentation has grown with them. So has its impact on productivity, in the wrong direction. There are plenty of examples of teams unable to build products because documentation took up their time. There’s no clear line for how much documentation is good, but it’s widely accepted that it adds value only up to a point, after which it adds less value and takes more time.

The product is what makes the work real

A working product should always be the primary priority. The product makes every activity tangible and gives the organisation its meaning.

That doesn’t make documentation optional. Imagine an automotive startup building a vehicle for the masses. Skip comprehensive documentation and the authorities may not certify the vehicle as safe. You’d have a working product you can’t sell. It’s one of many examples of why documentation is genuinely needed.

Why prioritise one over the other?

The Manifesto says both are critical, but it still puts one first. Two ways to see why:

• There’s no documentation without a product. Documentation is a by-product of the product, so it should always be secondary.
• The product gives an organisation its meaning; documentation transmits that meaning to everyone and keeps the organisation sustainable. And before you aim for sustainability, you need a product worth sustaining.