Black Swan Farming using Cost of Delay
Discover, nurture and speed up the delivery of value Improving prioritization has become a tired concept in most IT departments, and yet it has the potential to change the conversation from one of cutting cost, to delivering valuable solutions as quick as the business needs it. This paper examines how Maersk Line applied an economic…
Rimac the Black Swan
This thread is a classic Black Swan story:
3 anti-patterns to avoid in Product Development
In my travels in Product Development over the last decade or so, I’ve seen up close the value destroyed and delays incurred as a result of falling into three common traps. They’re all seemingly harmless or perhaps even considered good, but there’s some serious downsides that only become obvious much later. If you’re looking to…
Thinking different(ly) – 2023 Edition
2023 has been tough for a lot of organisations. As inflation got away on central banks interest rates headed north and all of a sudden it was all a bit different. What we’ve seen is that some were a bit drunk on cheap debt. Some organisations seem to have overhired. Others found that search for…
Thoughts on ChatGPT
Steve Jobs, “A Bicycle for the Mind” – on the invention of the personal computer: I remember reading an article when I was about 12 years old – i think it might have been Scientific American – where they measured the efficiency of locomotion for all these species on planet Earth, how much energy did…
Learning teams become earning teams
Product Development is a lot more like farming than it is like a manufacturing line or an engine. Manufacturing is usually incremental – lots of different parts with carefully controlled size and shape all need to be put together. Product Development on the other has is iterative. We repeat our process many times building on the…
Delivery Dates
Product Development involves tough choices and trade-offs. Here’s a typical one: what would you choose to optimise for? 1. Predictability (“on time, on budget”) 2. Throughput (Storypoints or maybe # of stories) 3. Speed (cycletime from idea to live) Of these three, a lot of organisations have a strong bias that optimises for predictability. Not…
Product Development Org Design – Principles
Some guiding principles that have emerged for me over the years of inheriting somewhat broken Product Development organisations – and the approach that has worked well for me. 1. Start where you are If you’re relatively new, or taking on a new area, first do no harm. Chesterton’s Fence applies. Without a good understanding of the local…
BA, PO, QA
This is from a while ago, written as an attempt to provide an overview of how these three roles have changed and how a large and complex organisation might transition from a more traditional setup to a more modern “fighting fit” one. Posit: the Business Analyst role is fading The role of Business Analysts in…
Warning signs and advice for Boards and Execs
Best to break this into a couple of key areas: a) major investments, and b) baseline risks, things you as an Exec team and/or Board of Director’s should probably be aware of. Major Investments tend to get a lot of focus up front, but often go sideways in similar ways and for similar reasons. Baseline…
“Delivery” ain’t enough.
Hard agree with Cyd Harrell: Launching is not success. Success is your product solving the problem it’s intended to solve, for the people you intended to help, without harming other people. If you can’t state what you’re solving, who it helps, & who could be hurt, you’re not ready to build let alone launch –…
Cost of Delay, NPV and Taguchi
Cost of Delay is a very different animal to many of the concepts that people try to shoe-horn it into. Sometimes those are useful analogies. Other times, it’s not helpful, and leads to confusion, missing the actual power of Cost of Delay. A Is Cost of Delay like a really high NPV discount rate? For…
Product Development is Poetry
This Ethan Hawke clip makes an important point that also applies to what we do in developing products. I think that most of us really want to offer the world something of quality, something that the world will consider good or important. And that’s really the enemy, because it’s not up to us whether what…
Culture and conformity
Here’s a perfect illustration of how organisational culture works: Something underneath the surface (not explicit or visible to individual actors) quietly amplifies conformity and dampens outliers. This is of course, a paradox. It’s a “good” thing when it comes to mission, vision, and rejecting toxic behaviour. It’s a “bad” thing if it means conforming thinking,…
Central Bank Digital Currency
CBDC discussions seem to be heating up. Be interesting to see where each of these four work streams at the European Central Bank lead to: “First, we will test the compatibility between a digital euro and existing central bank settlement services (such as TIPS),” outlines Panetta. Second, we will explore the interconnection between decentralised technologies,…
JTBD Lesson #3: Beware of Overserving!
Improving the product along obvious parameters of value as defined by your customers today tends to lead to overserving. At some point, it becomes more than they can absorb. Remember the “Advanced Photo System”? You have to be careful about Overserving. It’s tempting to offer all the bells and whistles that customers ask for or…
JTBD Lesson #2: The Job to be Done doesn’t change.
The second key lesson you might have already spotted in the example from Lesson 1: The JOB doesn’t change, The Product we hire does. Consider the previous JTBD, “sharing a moment with others”… Below is a (totally science fiction today) product from Magic Leap, an Augmented Reality startup working on overlaying 3D images on your…
JTBD Lesson #1: Focus on the higher purpose
As a Product team, it’s tempting to look at the product itself and focus almost entirely about how to make it “better” along parameters that we already measure, especially the ones that existing customers ask for. This is what Christensen calls “sustaining innovation”. What Jobs To Be Done suggests, however, is that we focus on…
JTBD (Jobs To Be Done) – An Intro
Jobs to be Done is a way of thinking about products and services. Using JTBD as a way of thinking brings a different perspective that helps us: Avoid building things that no one wants. Understand at a deeper level what a product needs to do Reveal why and how people choose a product or service…
Avoiding Disruption – 7 key points
The late Clayton M. Christensen researched and wrote one of the most frequently referenced books on innovation: “The Innovator’s Dilemma – when new technologies cause great firms to fail“. In it, Christensen outlines how companies tend to do everything “right” but in doing so, fail to successfully adopt new technologies. The book’s thesis is the…
Culture, Technology and Decay
In Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, Satis House (from the latin for “enough”) is a wonderful metaphor for technology in organisations today. So often, what you hope will satisfy you and be “enough”, quickly decays into dashed dreams and bitter disappointment. Why? Mostly culture, and a paradigm that’s completely broken, unsuited for the context and the…
Technical Debt != Bad Coding
“Technical Debt” is NOT the result of poor programming – it is the cost of not refactoring as you learn more about a solution. Like all things popular, “Technical Debt” has become a widely misunderstood and abused term. In some cases, Tech Debt is everything done by those who have gone before, “OPC”: Other People’s Code. Other times,…
How is Cost of Delay in SAFe calculated?
TL;DR: Poorly. Not recommended! If you want to delve into the details, read this. (The main problems are that it uses some made up relative terms and then combines them in a way that is illogical.) If you’ve already started using the made up relative terms that SAFe suggests, all is not lost. At least…
CapEx, OpEx and Accounting for Teams
Years ago, I wrote about funding teams instead of projects. That covered a really common big-batch funding and approval problem: the feast and famine – and the learning curves that teams go through before they’re really effective. In it, I also suggested some alternatives to big-batch project funding, giving you smoother flow of value plus…
On Backlogs and Buffers
A Backlog is different to a Buffer. In short, a Backlog should be a safe waiting place, where it is: a) cheap and b) fast for ideas of all sizes and complexities to flow to. The purpose of a Backlog is to have just enough information to do a very rough triage of a potentially…
Accountability vs Complexity
Ever been “held accountable” for something that you had no control or power over? I’ve previously spoken about how corrosive the words we use in organisations can be. Words matter. And some words tell you quite a lot about an organisation. One thing I’ve observed is the use of the phrase “hold to account” tends…
On “Trust” in Product Development
I rather rudely butted in on an interesting twitter exchange yesterday, which started off about assessments. John Cutler was sharing what he has learned from doing and iterating on them recently. Having done quite a few assessments over the last decade (and iterated and improved how we go about it) the observation I shared was…
The Product Backlog – “One safe waiting place”
What is a product backlog? What problem is it supposed to solve? What problems sometimes arise when using one? So many questions, and not a lot of guidance out there for Product Managers and Product Owners. What is a Backlog? The Agile Alliance’s definition starts off as follows: “A backlog is a list of features…
Cost of Delay and CD3 Prioritisation at Scale
“How to generate the highest Return On Investment toward strategic priorities — across multiple teams that need to work together.” I get asked this question a lot. I’ve also seen lots of slow, disjointed, unresponsive and generally painful ways to approach this — and in lots of different organisations. Rather than poking holes in alternatives,…
Part Three – Alternative measures? (Velocity needs to die)
Part One looked at Velocity, what it is, how it gets abused and what the typical result of that is – and therefore the need for an alternative. Part Two then considered what “agility” means, with three overlapping principles that we want to try and find some measures for. Now we want to look at…
Part Two – “Velocity” needs to die. Alternative measures?
So, we’ve briefly looked at Velocity, what it is, how it gets abused and what the typical result of that is – and therefore the need for an alternative. Now we’re going to look what “agility” means, with the intention of figuring out some measures that are better aligned with that. What does Agile really…
“Velocity” needs to die. Alternative measures?
Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time with senior Executives of different organisations. Along the way, I’ve noticed a tendency for them to latch onto, and misuse, the concept of “Velocity”. Too often, I’ve heard someone say something along the lines of “We need to increase our Velocity.” Whilst the terminology here really…
“Why doesn’t Apple make a printer?”
Someone asked the above question, and whilst it seems facile, I couldn’t resist… Short answer: because there’s no profit in it. Slightly longer answer… This quote from Tim Cook (emphasis mine) may seem to contradict the shorter answer, but bear with me: “Stock price is a result, not an achievement by itself. For me, it’s…
Single Prioritised Backlog – chat with John Cutler
Had an interesting conversation with John Cutler yesterday to discuss the idea of having a single prioritised Backlog for an organisation. The genesis for the chat came from a tweet that John posted, to which I responded: In the spirit of exploration and “strong opinions, weakly held, I’d love to debate this one with you.…
Survival in a demand-driven world
This is a really interesting read on Loose Threads. It talks about how the world of retail clothing has shifted from being supply-constrained to demand-driven. It looks at how Zara operates in the new world, and how others are struggling because they’re still setup on the basis on the old world, which is how they got…
Internal Product Management: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Applying Product Management to “Internal Products” can be a bit strange. Sometimes it feels a bit like trying to make a square peg fit into a round hole. Having observed lots of organisations (mostly large, some small) struggle with aspects of this, it’s something I’ve been mulling over for years now. Earlier this month I…
Why Duration and not Cost?
We get this question a lot. It is referring to the denominator of CD3 (Cost of Delay Divided by Duration). For various reasons, people struggle with this. There’s perhaps an element of bikeshedding involved too, with people generally more comfortable talking about what they know and understand, and avoiding the Cost of Delay part, which…
Develop Better Products by Understanding Jobs To Be Done – Agile2017 Workshop
Abstract: Jobs to be Done (JTBD) is an interview technique and way of thinking for revealing deeper insights into why people choose a product or service. Using JTBD helps us to avoid building stuff that no-one wants. It is a way to better understand what a product or service really needs to do. Why this…
The Agile PMO: 6 things you need to nail – Agile2017
Abstract: What does the PMO actually do in an agile, learning organisation? The leading vs dragging PMO In many organisations the PMO tends to be part of the problem rather than part of the solution. They tend to frustrate attempts to improve agility that come from either bottom-up team level adoption of agile and top-down…
How to Train Your HiPPO (Workshop) – Agile2017
Abstract: Have you noticed the impact when someone more senior in your organisation shares their opinion? Meet the HiPPO: the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion. Sometimes it’s subtle and unintended. Other times it’s more direct and intentional. Either way, the HiPPO is a dangerous animal in Product Management. When we allow the HiPPO to drive decision-making…
How to do a *really* basic forecast
Forecasting delivery is something every organisation should be doing. Unfortunately, hardly any do. This is a shame because it’s actually quite easy, as hopefully you’ll see below. Even a very basic forecast is better than blindly following a plan. It doesn’t need to be super complicated. There will be flaws, of course, but much like qualitative cost of…
Product Roadmaps and Cost of Delay
I sometimes get asked about how Cost of Delay and CD3 work with Product Roadmaps. This post is an initial attempt to collate my current thinking on this (as green as that may be). Firstly, it really depends what you mean by “Roadmap”. I’ve seen lots of Roadmaps, mostly bad, and a few good ones.…
Product Management with Cost of Delay – Greece – March 2017
Two-day course in Athens, Greece, with Özlem Yüce. When: 22 & 23 March 2017 (2 days duration course) Early Bird Price: €600 + VAT / person (until 28 February 2017) – Use code EARLYBIRD at checkout Normal Price: €650 + VAT / person Product Management and Product Ownership are incredibly difficult roles. The easy part is…
CD3 and Cost of Delay puzzles
Johanna Rothman sent us through some common puzzles about Cost of Delay and CD3. Posting our thoughts here, in case others have similar questions or suggestions… “Who estimates the Value part of Cost of Delay?” In most organisations it tends to be the Product Owners or Product Managers who facilitate estimating the Cost of Delay. We see them more…
Product Roadmaps
What is a Product Roadmap for? What is the “job to be done” for which people “hire” Product Roadmaps? Of course, there are lots of different behaviours that Product Roadmaps support. Some of these behaviours are good, improving our chances of delivering something of value. Some, not so good. Even what might be considered “not so good”…
Citizen Thiel spots an Asymmetric Opportunity
There’s been quite a lot of kerfuffle in New Zealand about the fact that Peter Thiel has been granted Citizenship. Given his background in PayPal, Facebook and other startups, I don’t think it’s that controversial that NZ would want to attract someone like Thiel to get involved in our economy. I also don’t think someone’s…
Stable Teams, Multiple Stakeholders
Some organisations struggle with team stability due to having to deal with multiple stakeholders. This is a fairly common situation. Typically, these stakeholders represent completely different departments or “silos” in an organisation, and they often have their own budgets. (This exposes one of the issues with departmental budgets in that they often make a claim on…
CD3 and proportionality to Outcomes
Here’s an interesting question: “I have been busy trying to figure out Cost of Delay but I’m stuck on a certain question — hopefully you can enlighten me. An example: Let’s say I have an ice cream stand that is currently at capacity, selling 10 ice-creams per week. I have two options to boost capacity: Option…
How to Find Gun Owners Fast
This is a wonderful piece by Jeanne Marie Laskas, writing for GQ magazine. It’s about a strange little federal agency in the US that runs traces on guns that are associated with a crime, trying to figure out who bought it. It’s long, but well worth reading in it’s entirety. There’s a few parts worth highlighting and looking into a…
Relaxing constraints, moving mountains
A sorely underutilised way to tilt the playing field in Product Development is to simply break the rules that everyone else is playing by. This “thinking different” is often the underlying enabler to many successful products and business models. Southwest did it with completely ridiculous turnaround times, which completely changed the economics of running an airline. AirBnB are…
How to create perfect teams
From this article by Cath Everett about some of the rather desperate tactics some companies in Silicon Valley are experimenting with to get more out of their people: “As to how to go about creating the perfect team, Forsgren cites a study undertaken by Google in 2012 called Project Aristotle, which set out to do…