Back in 2018, a team of industry thought leaders developed the Quartz Open framework—an open-source process model for product teams that is extensible and adaptable.
Having implemented Quartz with multiple teams, we’ve found new and better ways to use it and describe it. We’ve adopted a few changes based on feedback from teams like yours.
LEARN has always been the core of the Quartz Open Framework but this caused some confusion with DISCOVER. DISCOVER is actually one aspect of learning. So, to make things clearer, we changed the first facet from DISCOVER to DEFINE. That is, you’ve learned from the market and discovered some new product ideas. DEFINE those ideas first, and then move them to COMMIT.
Some teams have been confused by the idea of CONNECTING with the market, so we combined it with DELIVER, as in delivering the solution to the market and customers. And in its place, we put PREPARE. Our implementation partners encountered many who wanted to call out the details of preparing for delivery to the market, what we often call launch planning.
As we try to explain the scope of managing products from idea to market, many people see the old hexagonal shape as a series of discrete steps, one after another. To better illustrate how these facets happen concurrently, the new Quartz Open Framework is a series of overlapping facets or wedges. Perhaps the most critical example is the overlapping of CREATE with PREPARE. While one team is creating, another is preparing the organization, which happens concurrently.
So that’s what’s new with the Quartz Open Framework. It shows the interaction between facets more clearly. The names for each facet resonate even better with most product professionals with continuous learning at the core of everything we do.
The Quartz Open Framework: new graphic, new labels, new colors, and new templates.
We hope you’ll like the new framework even better than before. Use the Quartz Open Framework to define and optimize your process from idea to market.
Go to our Downloads page to get templates for the Quartz Open Framework.