It’s time to challenge the myth that success relies upon the copiously detailed Jira ticket or the perfectly refined development workflow.
Simply stacking up new features doesn’t move the needle on the bottom line.
The real secret to maximizing business value begins much earlier than most anticipate. It begins with a laser-sharp focus on defining clear strategies and objectives before the project even starts.
Leaders must carve out sharp, actionable goals and empower teams to pursue them without interruption.
Mastery in driving value with our work has little to do with following precise plans and all to do with harnessing our focus to driving business results. As you make this adjustment with all the work that you steward, you’ll find yourself at the head of a rare community of leaders.
Context: I know you can fight
In the modern classic Braveheart, the young future Warrior-King of Scotland wants to pick up a sword and help fight alongside his family, when his father admonishes: "I know you can fight…but it's our wits that make us men."
Humans are adept at identifying problems and for product leaders and other high contributors, the urge is strong to jump in or fight.
Even more, in our team processes and tooling, we have optimized to become ruthlessly efficient at continuously delivering updates to our applications. We adjust meetings and focus team members on responding to new work with haste. We deliver “wins” continuously.
But are frequency of deployments or quantity of new features the best measurements for our business impact?
We challenge that urgent action is not the behavior to rally around - not the main marker for success.
Often times action takes the form of:
- “I know what we need to do!”
- “I know how to fix this!”
- “If we have the right requirements…”
You need a strategy and a vision before you jump into urgent action. The urgency doesn’t matter if you’re not all working in the right direction.
We routinely raise this point with our clients, just like that to the young William. We know you can fight (build and fix things) – but using your wits is essential to picking the right fight. Your Wits (your experience and intuition) is how you’ve driven your business to date, and it's your strategic poise that will help carry your business forward – more so than your response time.
By first evaluating opportunities through a strategic lens, our work has a better opportunity to achieve the value desired, and also can be corrected before too much effort is committed. Especially before impact against our business goals is unconfirmed.
Objective: What’s the problem here?
Many articles today caution teams against becoming “feature factories.” This caution pushes against behavior that sees work as an urgent activity of asking in the right way for the right thing, or said differently: “just throw in a ticket.”
Rather than focusing on how work should be refined or requested, focus instead on preparing the team with intended outcomes supported by relevant context:
- Why does this work matter?
- Why address this problem?
- Why chase that market opportunity?
- Why not later?
A different way to correct an over-emphasis on process is to consider: “What responsibility do you, the Requestor, have in this scenario? What role do you, as Product Leader, play in the creation and execution of work?”
If your teams experience work in a mostly transactional way, do you see the benefit in equipping them first with shape around what goals you have and why those goals are important to the Org? The urgency and how of the work can then adopt appropriate shape as your team works to secure that value.
Even if your team is not guilty of a feature factory mentality, the value of defining success at the beginning of work is immeasurable:
- Instead of I know what we need to do… Try there are several solutions, which is the bet we want to make?
- Instead of I know who can fix this…Try We understand the goal, give us time to research several options.
- Instead of If we can perfectly nail the requirements…Try How do we empower our Users to achieve their goals – rather than simply shipping more features?
Adjustment: Response
If you’ve observed behavior focused on how over why, and you want to test us on our challenge to focus on measurable targets, here are a couple adjustments to consider:
First, clearly align the full team, from Sponsors to those writing code, with your strategic aims. What is the value you’re working toward for your customers and users, and how, specifically, can the team measure whether you’ve been successful with what they produce?
Note: don’t let “strategy” take you down a rabbit trail! Start with what you know! What is your business and what is one clear way you might move the needle on value?
Second, consider process updates that bake in identification and shaping up of new features or opportunities not only as a ticket to complete, but as investments to consider. “Consider” means we evaluate options and choose or decline them relative to how they align to our Strategy and goal. Again, long before we invest time in the work.
Last, urgency and eagerness is a great characteristic of a team! Can you harness that energy to better forecast and identify the change that moves the needle for your business?
After all, it’s your Wits that lead to lasting success, more than your Fight.
