product discovery – Software Superglue

Bringing together the necessary disciplines to form high-performance cross-functional teams is a key management decision when creating good software products. All software products are one-offs, unique, so having the product owner, designer, developers and testers in the same team is the most effective way to make essential trade-offs when delivering “good enough” solutions. Add to this the importance of early feedback that only comes from doing iterative releases, and an empowered cross-functional teams becomes the best vehicle for success in a highly-competitive marketplace.

True product teams do exist, but more often they are really just delivery teams, or at best feature teams. The distinction can be captured with the question: Are we giving the teams problems to solve or solutions to build? True product teams are trusted to come up with the best solutions to meet business objectives. However, lack of trust is often a big issue, but so is a lack of maturity. Product teams take time to form and usually need coaching. Management should also focus on the teams’ outcomes and allow them to do their jobs without too much interference.

One way of organising the company is to give the product discovery activities to a separate “Product Team” with the necessary competencies: POs, designers, business analysts, etc. This team should then come up with the winning product concepts for the cross-functional teams to build. This reduces the other teams to being delivery teams doing exactly what the “Product Team” decides. One side-effect of this is that there is now no room for doing experiments in the teams since the course is already plotted.

The problem with this model is that “Product Team” will have been given a purpose with the expectation to deliver something useful. There is then pressure on the team to come up with guaranteed money-spinners for the company, and they will work hard to describe a viable product solution, often using high-fidelity prototypes. This results in a large chunk of work, essentially a requirements document, even if it is in graphical format, that must be handed over to the feature/delivery teams, who must then start over, making the necessary trade-offs and reorganising the work into iterations. The delivery teams may well use Agile techniques and tools to build the solution, but it is really just operating in a big waterfall process.

The best products are built by teams that care about the products they build and the customers that use them. Naturally, they will have insights and ideas about improvements (experiments) that can be made to the product, and in a true product team this is how discovery and delivery are combined to deliver just enough software to satisfy the customers’ needs. However, in the waterfall process described above the ability of the delivery/feature team to influence the product is limited because a) the waterfall process is one-way and b) the “Product Team” see concept work as being their sole responsibility. This is a major cause of frustration for the teams and as a result there is a big risk that the most engaged team members will leave to find companies where they are allowed to make impact on the product.

The PO is a key member in a cross-functional team. If the team is a true product team then the PO will take total ownership of the product and be involved in all aspects of the product lifecycle, from concept and feature development to back-office processes and support tools, legal requirements, and more. However, in the waterfall process above, they essentially have only two roles, one is as a delivery manager in the delivery team, the other as a feature expert in the “Product Team”. Neither role covers the totality of a true Product Owner role; in fact the waterfall process is really just driving a feature factory. Of course, delivering customer value is the most important thing the team can do, but it is not the only thing, the problem is that the waterfall process does not support delivering other types of value.

In giving responsibility for these two closely interlinked processes of discovery and delivery to different teams, management is obliged to ensure that a good relationship exists between the teams to ensure success, and that the one-way waterfall process becomes instead a two-way exchange of ideas between partners. In the worst case, management are de facto prioritising feature delivery over every other type of work, ignoring the fact that different types of value exist, value which can have just as much impact on the company fortunes as feature development.

Companies already in the situation described above can try to improve it, but a sense of trust has to exist between all of the teams to do so, because changing how we work requires that we trust that the changes are for the good of the company and not only for the good of one team. This requires strong management support.

When adopting an Agile development process, the team should start with visualising their work using a Kanban board. At the start, the items on the board will probably cover a whole range of work including hopefully a few User Stories. What can happen then is that if the team uses these items to try to create flow they will probably end up trying to model their entire development process (from idea to product) on the Kanban board, or worse still, try to apply Sprint planning to it.

This is especially true for platform teams that move to become cross-functional teams. The problem is that a Kanban board can only really handle the flow of one type of object (i.e. model one process) and that object has to have a clear “Definition of Done”. But hey, the whole point of using Kanban is to visualise the work so the team can do something about it to improve flow.

As I said, the Kanban board works best if you supply it with right-sized work items, and in software development these items are usually User Stories. But using Kanban to manage the flow of User Stories is only going to capture one part of the work that the team do to deliver the right thing to customers. The other part is the preparation of these valuable right-sized User Stories and their acceptance criteria, what is known as the Product Discovery process. Product Discovery and Product Development form a highly integrated dual-track development process.

Product Discovery follows a different process to User Stories: ideas are being analysed and discarded or morphing into something else. (It is a fluid process, but Kanban can still be used even here to visualise it). So even though the team could be spending 50% of their time breaking down the problem, defining an MVP and creating good User Stories, this effort will not be visible on the User Story Kanban board. Or more accurately, the time spent is not part of the User Story lifecycle, since the story can’t start its journey across the Kanban board until the discovery process is complete.

This is not to say that the team cannot visualise discovery work, it just means that it cannot be attached to any particular User Story. Instead the team can represent it using another object: the Task. Unlike Stories, Tasks do not deliver customer value. Tasks could cover any kind of activity: a spike, an analysis, purchasing a license, setting up an environment, etc. Even if there is no customer value involved, the team should still strive to create well-defined or time-boxed tasks: what is the spike attempting to prove? When is the setup complete? In other words, Tasks must also have a clear “Definition of Done”.

While the Kanban board can be used to track Tasks, the team should only use it for well-defined tasks. Activities like meetings and discovery sessions form part of the team’s work that should not be quantified using Kanban. After all, the goal is to deliver valuable right-sized User Stories to the customer, not to document the completion of Tasks.

Lastly, the team can benefit from being able to visualise which User Stories belong to which MVP. In Jira (for example) the team can group related User Stories using the Epic Issue Type. Thus, an Epic can be used to represent an MVP. If the team want to track activities related to breaking down the MVP, then they can also be associated with the Epic. Finally, the team can also create a separate Epic Kanban Board which track the flow of Epics: they are bigger objects that move more slowly but should still have a clear Definition of Done.

Tag: product discovery

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