All Posts

In a world before software started eating the world Product Development was more simple: Focus on the Customer Experience (CX) and success would eventually follow. Then, along with the rise of the Internet, the modern web and a smartphone in every pocket, new possibilities arose. What was considered

The late Dr Russell Ackoff had an incredible ability to see and say things that capture so much. For instance, anyone who’s worked in the public sector should recognise this one: “A bureaucrat is one who has the power to say “no” but none to say “yes.”” And

When people talk about “projects” it’s sometimes hard to nail down what they actually mean. Some seem to refer to any loosely organised or directed effort toward a goal as a “project”. Using this dictionary definition, something as simple as writing this blog post could

TL;DR: neither are a solution on their own. Whenever you have more than one team (in which case Global effectively equals Local) you need both. This post comes as a train of thought after reading and responding briefly to Wolfram Mueller on LinkedIn, with a post that “all local priority scheme

It’s taken much longer than I had hoped (because we often don’t share and learn from the negative examples in this industry), but I feel like the end of SAFe is coming:

This from @sbhigham is pretty accurate. Double the timeframes if your org has more than ~50 people in Digital/Tech. Double it again if you have over 250. This is why I advise orgs to not forecast any more than 1 Quarter into the future. Beyond that, your confidence interval is probably somewhere bet

Love this Twitter/X post from Pawel Huryn. It’s an excellent summary of a “via negativa” exploration of the role of Product Management as part of the whole Product Development ecosystem: Thanks for sharing, Pawel.

Loads of organisations are heavily reliant on using platforms provided by others. But how to work in partnership with those Platform Providers can be difficult. Having been on both sides of this in my career, here’s a few pointers for the customers of platform providers to look out for. Caveat

A bit of a rant from Threads: Post by @blackswanfarming View on Threads “The Business” – this is a phrase that should be used sparingly in Product Development, if at all. How does it show up? “What does the business want?” is one example.Have you ever heard, “The busine

This may seem a bit off topic, but losing your life savings due to a phishing attack that drains your accounts is a Black Swan event for many folks. Even though phishing attacks are common enough to regularly make the newspaper, the status quo for financial services when emailing customers is still

Not much more to say on this. It’s not that hard to grok. We manage to do it with “sheep”, without too much confusion (past the age of about 4 or 5). We should probably put the same effort into our National Bird that also serves as a reference to the people of Aotearoa New […]

Seen this many times. Feels good, but the feeling doesn’t last, and it doesn’t solve the fundamental problem. In fact, it prolongs the problem, which is a bit sad. Firstly, let’s understand the motivation. The problem The team is overloaded. They’ve been working on a few real

It’s the 2020s (or as my kids say, “The 20’s”) and we’ve still got organisations using outdated methods for managing software endeavours. A big part of the reason that’s the case is that folks haven’t quite realised that software isn’t like building or renovating a house or buildin

Fairy tales are tempting. Especially so when it comes to big complex missions that have a lot of money, time and risk associated. Decisions need to be made at the point where we don’t know a whole lot, but that’s uncomfortable. And there’s lots of knock on effects and dependencies

Just realising that I’ve not posted anywhere a graphic that I’ve been using for over 10 years now. These are the three different perspectives that are usually in tension within a Product Squad setup. Yes they overlap, so it’s not a tidy roles and responsibilities, and don’t e

This post is a follow on from an overview of the Product Development Heartbeat. The Quarterly Look Ahead (QLA) is the part of that overall rhythm that pulls together teams, stakeholders and the wider org and helps with alignment to strategic goals and outcomes or objectives. So, how to approach this

Lots of organisations as they grow start to struggle with how to stay aligned while maintaining the autonomy of when they were smaller. What works for one or two squads starts to fall apart at four or five and is generally untenable above Dunbar’s number (~120 people). Here’s a rough way

This thread is a classic Black Swan story. (Fair warning, the 1 of 2 is a classic underestimation.) Still worth your time reading. And just to copy it here in case Twitter/X falls over or it gets deleted: Here is the story of Rimac: About 15 years ago, a Croatian dude appeared on a DIY […]

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 b

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 fo

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 muc

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 proc

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

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’

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 An

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. Baselin

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

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

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 t

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,

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 exp

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 whist

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

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 J

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 [&hel

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 do

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? M

“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 do

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.

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

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 […]

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 o

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)

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 back

“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 dif

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

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

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 nee

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, no

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 de

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 worl

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 m

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

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

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 adopti

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 Mana

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

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 f

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 d

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 Mana

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

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

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 expose

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

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&#

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 ridiculou

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,

There are many different ways to approach Cost of Delay. It ranges from very simple categorisation or qualitative assessments, to more rigorous quantification of Cost of Delay. None of these is inherently “wrong”. (Rarely are things as black and white as that.) T

One of the first articles I published highlights the problems created by doing funding and approval in large batches. Unfortunately, this is the status quo in most organisations and a lot of the malaise we see in I.T. is difficult to improve because of this. Addressing this requires a viable alterna

I have previously shared my view on the way SAFe teaches Cost of Delay. It’s possible that the feedback came in too large a batch, so maybe I can break it down and suggest some incremental improvements. I’ll start with the part I struggle with the most and see if we can make it just a li

Less than a month to go! Agile2016 is on July 25-29 in Atlanta, GA, USA. Widely regarded as the premier Agile conference in the world, Agile2016 offers an unprecedented opportunity to learn from world-class experts and thought leaders while networking and collaborating with up to 2,500 Agile profess

“Blindness to queues” is one of the cardinal sins of product development. Why? Well, here is a typical value stream map for a feature being delivered by a software team. Notice all the waiting? Not laziness: lots of Work-In-Process; Demand > Supply The reason for all the waiting is no

This Popular Mechanics article about Elevator Scheduling Algorithms is well worth a read. This part in particular struck me: With the elevators directing themselves, engineers had to spell out rules for when to go where. The simplest method was for the elevators to shuttle back and forth between pre

I’m going to break the first rule of #NoProjects (again), to collect a few artefacts in one place, mostly for reference purposes. I’ve been learning about the limitations of and dismantling what I would suggest is the abuse of the project vehicle in inappropriate contexts for a long time

From a while back, but still as relevant today as back then. Feel free to join in… #iHaveADream that Project Managers are incentivised to kill projects early, by exposing assumptions about value & testing them quickly — Joshua J. Arnold (@joshuajames) November 18, 2015 #IHaveADream, that e

In a comment on another post, Chris Matts pointed towards a video that I think every manager should watch. The video is of Clay Christensen at the Drucker Forum outlining his categorisation of innovation and presenting an argument that the world of finance has driven us to using the wrong metrics. I

Charlton Ogburn, an Officer during World War II wrote this in 1957: We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized. Presumably the plans for our employment were being changed. I was to learn later in life that, perhaps because we are so

From Amazon’s “2015 Letter to Shareholders“: To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment. Most large organizations embrace the idea of invention, but are not willing to suffer the string of failed experiments necessar

If you want to make better Product Development decisions, it really helps if you quantify the Cost of Delay. But what if you’re allergic to numbers? Perhaps a qualitative assessment of Cost of Delay would help get you started? Having helped lots of organisations quantify Cost of Delay across t

A couple of week’s ago I received an email asking how for help with applying Cost of Delay and CD3 to some potentially difficult cases. I enjoy these challenges. For an idea to survive, it needs to be stressed to see how it responds. Maybe the idea is completely flawed (e.g. the Geocentric mod

You hear a lot of people talking about “Scaling” Software Delivery. Like it or not, it is something many large organisations spend a lot of energy struggling with. What I find interesting though, is how it often means that they want to skip the learning part and go straight to the scaled

Having been involved in a number of “Digital Transformations” I’ve observed some useful patterns of both failure and success that you might want to consider. I hesitate to use the term “Digital Transformation” because isn’t very well defined. It has also been some

When it comes to software, in many organisations the PMO – Project Management Office – is part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Part of the reason for this is that the approach doesn’t really fit the context. Developing great software that people love i

The Highest Paid Person’s Opinion. If you’ve spent any reasonable length of time in a large corporate environment you will probably have seen something a bit like this first hand. It usually happens when a group of people are attempting to make a difficult decision, for which there are l

This, from a great piece by @tcarmody on the film Alien, and what it teaches us about ourselves and technology: That’s what technology is. It’s the world of things, some impossibly stupid, some smarter than we are, we have assembled around ourselves to cover over our fundamental weaknesses as a spec

A while back, I floated the idea of a conference where all of the speakers were women… @pawelbrodzinski i quite like the idea of a conference with women-only speakers — and men-only serving tea and coffee. — Joshua J. Arnold (@joshuajames) December 11, 2014 Not that anyone is asking for my opi

Jim Womack’s keynote at the LPPDE14 conference in Durham nicely captures one of the key problems faced in Product Development: Most organizations are organized vertically […] but the product needs to flow horizontally across the organization in order to be made right/well and solve a rea

Many observers will look at ApplePay and misunderstand it. They will likely see it as another example of Apple coming late to the party with nothing that hasn’t already been done before – and dominating on the basis of superior “marketing”. (Presumably this is primarily thanks to t

I posted an answer on Quora the other day in response to the question about how to gamify sprints as a way of motivating teams: Try sharing with the team the #CostOfDelay of the things they are working on in $/week. For example: “The Cost of Delay for this story is $50,000/week. What this mean

  Less than 24 hours back from two great conferences in Istanbul and Paris before heading to Hamburg to complete the tour. Lean Kanban Central Europe brings together more than 30 international speakers who will share their experience reports, case studies, and advanced ideas on managing knowled

One of the cheapest ways to tilt the playing field is to reduce the “batching” together of features and requirements. It was a big part of what we did at Maersk Line – which led to delivering in half the previous lead-time, 80% reduction in quality issues and delivering significantly mor

We’re coming to London! Lean Kanban United Kingdom is for managers, team leads, consultants and executives who want to more reliably deliver the products and services their customers demand. From curious to expert, there’s something for everyone who is looking to: Learn new techniques an

Randall Munroe of XKCD with a nice example of why useful rules of thumb that apply well in one context don’t always apply elsewhere… I hear lots of these. People with a software background seem to be really good at “generalising the particular”. One piece flow = good. Push =

We are about to see a significant shift of focus in personal computing. The smartphone is fast approaching saturation. It’s gotten to the point where if your parents don’t have a smartphone that’s abnormal. There’s clearly two dominant players (Android and iOS) and a few has-

Quantifying the Cost of Delay of the things we are working on helps us with: Improving the ROI delivered with a scarce resource Managing the demands of multiple stakeholders Making sensible economic trade-offs Changing the focus of the conversation: less on cost and dates, more on Value and Urgency.

Horace Deidu recently started working at The Clayton Christensen Institute, to help further develop the theory of disruptive innovation. Here, he nails his thesis on the door of Wall Street: Because firms are increasingly determining the prosperity and sustainability of nations and the world. We can

In 2012, when Dean Leffingwell launched the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) it was obvious the impact that Don Reinertsen’s teachings had on elements of the design. In particular, SAFe specifies Don’s recommended method for scheduling: Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF). Whatever you think

What is WSJF? Weighted Shortest Job First is a scheduling algorithm (or if you prefer, prioritisation method) that maximises the amount of whatever it is you choose to “weight” by in a given time period through a constrained resource. Where did WSJF come from? Back in the 1970’s, w

Interested in culture, and introducing change in organisations? Özlem Yüce has a great intro to the Tribal Leadership stages that is well worth a read. I want to expand on a couple of things, but you really should go read her thing first (and share your view in the poll) otherwise what I’m abo

I recently gave a talk at a conference about “Tilting the playing field in product development”. I went through a number of “False Friends” – things that seem like a good idea, but actually lead us into trouble. The last of these was “Certainty”. The sto

This! With the vastness of opportunities in technology, how are you going to retain your most important resource? Talent is far harder to obtain than capital. We are obsessed with allocating capital when in fact capital is over-abundant and should be spent freely. Meanwhile, we wrongly treat the sou

When it comes to estimating value the biggest barrier is usually our own fixed-mindset. It is our prejudices and perceptions, fears and uncertainties that stop us from seeing what might be. To an impartial observer, it might seem like we have an allergy — where if we were to talk about value in term

One of the best ways to tilt the playing field of Product Development is to take an iterative or incremental approach. What does this mean though? It is easy to get confused about the difference between the two. Scrum, (one of the most popular software development frameworks) is an iterative me

  How should we treat cannibalization when considering value and urgency? I have been asked this a number of times, usually in the context of quantifying the Cost of Delay. The issue at hand is whether you should take into account the likelihood that a new product or feature might “eat

We’re coming to Orlando! Serious teams, developers, managers and executives from over 40 countries are about to descend on an unsuspecting Orlando, Florida. There’ll be over 1,800 attendees exploring more than 240 talks and workshops from some world-class experts. We have been invited to

What is design? As an engineer, I have some tacit knowledge of design – but I have always struggled to explain what it really means. When I started my career, I spent most of my days dealing with the vagaries of moving water and earth, applying different designs that attempted to bend these elements

Q: What are the biggest obstacles organisations face when it comes to innovation? Three things: culture, culture and culture. This manifests in different ways in different organisations but at its root, it’s culture that tends to hold you back the most. Innovation requires a discovery mindset,

Özlem Yüce is coming to Lyon, France to speak at MIXIT14! How can we survive in a world where stakeholders want it all – and they want it yesterday? Are you tired of conflicting priorities and mechanisms that do not give your clear focus? Then this session is for you! At the end of Özlem’s [&h

We’re coming to San Francisco! Looking forward to hearing some fantastic speakers talk about “Modern Management Methods” and share a few stories and thoughts of our own, at the Lean Kanban North America 2014 conference. We’ve got a couple of slots: The first will be a talk on

A while back I posted this quote from a BBC interview with Astro Teller, “Capitain of Moonshots” at Google[x]: You must reward people for failing, he says. If not, they won’t take risks and make breakthroughs. If you don’t reward failure, people will hang on to a doomed idea

I got an interesting question the other day about speeding up the Fuzzy Front End and bringing it into focus. The question was about the size of things in the Dynamic Priority List (the queue or backlog, where ideas wait after being quickly captured, valued and sized). The heuristic to apply here is

Billy Beane, the manager of the Oakland A’s baseball team was in trouble. After a successful 2001 season he was losing three of his best players but he had no money to replace them. As Plato said: “Necessity is the mother of invention”. With his back to the wall, rather than rely o

What “job” do customers hire your product or service to do? A lot of the time, customers aren’t actually buying what you think they are. Let’s take Flappy Bird as an example. One job to be done — that this fiendishly difficult game did beautifully — was to provide a simple, f

When people hear about Cost of Delay they sometimes doubt whether their organisation is ready for it. They say things like, “We don’t have the maturity for it”, or “We couldn’t do that because our stakeholders wouldn’t support it”. This hypothesis, that the organisation isn&#

It’s been an interesting few weeks in technology. We’ve seen a couple of events that we might characterise as Black Swans – but both reinforcing the fact that the world has changed. In the first, we saw the incredible rise of a simple but notoriously difficult game called Flappy Bird. Th

In an earlier post, I discussed the importance of speed and the cost of delay for organisations that aren’t leading the market. For those who are attempting to lead the market (as opposed to a fast follower strategy, like Samsung) the Cost of Delay is still there, and speed is still a vital in

Chris Matts recently wrote about the impact of discounting on investments in software development. He showed a comparison between a few different investment options for a software project in order to demonstrate the negligible effect of discounting. Whilst I agree with the conclusion – that discount

One of the most incredible things I have experienced as a human being is the feeling of riding a moving wall of water. I am most happy when I’m paddling around in a rubber suit putting myself in the path of rolling mountains of H2O and trying to catch them. Living in London means I don’t

An interesting rumour from @markgurman writing for 9to5mac.com: Besides fitness tracking, a marquee feature of “Healthbook” will be the ability to monitor a user’s vital signs. The application will be able to track a person’s blood pressure, hydration levels, heart rate, and potentially several othe

Developing new and improved products and services is an interesting problem space. Part of what makes it interesting is the presence of risks, uncertainties, and the possibility of Black Swan events. For some category of risk, we can calculate the probability. The roll of dice. A roulette wheel. The

From a BBC interview with Astro Teller, “Capitain of Moonshots” at Google[x]: You must reward people for failing, he says. If not, they won’t take risks and make breakthroughs. If you don’t reward failure, people will hang on to a doomed idea for fear of the consequences. Tha

In 82 AD, the roman satirist Juvenal wrote of the existence of a “perfect wife” being like that of a non-existent bird – nigroque cycnoa – the black swan. Juvenal’s “Black Swan” was subsequently used across Europe as a synonym for something which could not exist. And so

The desire to make software development “cheaper” is something I hear a lot. It’s also usually a red herring. The irrelevance of “cheaper” becomes apparent when you start asking what is it exactly that they would like to be cheaper. Before long you’re dividing the

Putting a price tag on time can sound scary. A common fear is that the estimate of value will be misused as a tool for planning – much like other estimates of time or cost often are. When estimates are later proven to lack the precision they never had, those who underestimate the complexity of [&hel

If you consider the economic value and urgency for each of the requirements for your software development project, you will likely find that it is not evenly distributed. It’s not four levels of value (like MoSCoW might suggest). It’s also not linear (like your relatively prioritised bac

I used to be a bit obsessive about my Single Lens Reflex camera. I spent a lot of money buying glass for what is really just a fancy box with a hole in it. For many years the photosensitive surface inside was a combination of chemicals with various sensitivities to brightness and colour, but for [&h

One of the components to consider when trying to understand Cost of Delay is the value of Information Discovery. This can take on two basic forms: knowing which paths will likely lead to success, and; knowing which paths will likely lead to failure. What would it be worth to simply have better knowl

Nearly every company I have worked with in the last 15 years has at some point embarked on a major system replacement, or spent a serious amount of time and effort investigating doing so. I wrote a bit about this here, referring to Joel Spolsky’s advice to never do this as well as Dan Milstein

I have heard many managers refer to the loss of people in an organisation by way of a simple analogy — “Wheat and chaff”, they say. The insinuation is obvious: those who leave an organisation are chaff, or waste; those who choose to stay are the wheat, or value-adding parts. It’s a nice, simple excu

Those who work with me are, I’m sure, quite sick of me saying the phrase “jobs to be done”. At first they give me a quizzical look, as if I am talking about some unspoken to-do list. But whenever you are developing new or improved products it is the central question around which al

On August 5-9, I attended the biggest Agile conference on the planet: Agile2013. What I hoped to get from the conference (my first) was to meet interesting people, hear about their experience and learn something as well as giving something back. It was fairly cheap to check it out, since the talk I

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 h

In today’s world, whatever we do has to have meaning — it’s not just about money anymore. Some of that meaning can come from working together, with a common purpose. But what we build together should also mean something, and resonate in some way, with the wider world — the external audie

I’ve been mulling over this question from Steve Smith: @AgileSteveSmith: @joshuajames Do you know of any resources on when change initiatives are bestlaunched? E.g. After a big failure, new CxO etc. Cheers The trite answer, the one that first popped into my head? “Yesterday”. Basic

One of the most painful parts of product development is the estimating part. Dan Milstein talks (at length) about the complexity of this in his post about why we all suck at making estimates. When you first hit this pain, you think “We should just be more careful at the specification stage”. But thi

If you’re considering doing a system rewrite there are a couple of posts that I would strongly recommend you read. The first is by Joel Spolsky about the folly of doing system rewrites called “Things you should never do“. Go read that first. I’ll wait… The second is a g

Paul Dolman Darrall recently tweeted an blog post by David Erdal where he asks the question “Are we peasants or partners?” where he talks a bit about ownership and partnership. If we wade through his political views, he does actually have something interesting to say about where the puck

You may have heard of, or even played the speedboat innovation game to help identify what customers don’t like about your product or service. I’ve used a slightly tweaked version of this game a number of times with different organisations when looking at how they innovate. It helps to ve

Sometimes, it’s so easy to identify patterns of slow delivery, marginal value and poor quality in systems, it’s almost criminal that they have persisted at all. To a seasoned, knowledgeable observer, there is the distinct whiff of imminent failure. All too often, these bad smells arise w

Two very good friends of mine are a bit special. Despite their intelligence and normally being trustworthy and of excellent judgement, for some inexplicable reason they absolutely love Eurovision. I just don’t get it. To me Eurovision seems a somewhat amusing but mostly irrelevant sideshow, wi

Interesting question from the resident DJ Rough: Urgent Optimism and how it can drive behaviour: gamification.co/2013/02/14/how… So, is Cost Of Delay entering into gamification? /cc @joshuajames — Dan Rough (@danrough) April 3, 2013 The article he’s pointing to talks about how we are motivated

How might we think about the potential value of the products and services we could develop? Is there some way of structuring our thoughts so as to more quickly surface the potential value? I want to explain a bit about the background and development of a framework that attempts to do just that. This

The Cost of Delay for organisations that are not market leaders is very high. Whilst companies employing a “Fast Follower” strategy don’t have to invest as much time to discover what the market wants, they do need to be very fast at developing similar products in order to quickly c

A couple of days ago I tweeted a seemingly random thought: “Waterfall is not the opposite of Agile. An organisation may use a waterfall process and still be agile.” Now, I completely accept that within twitter’s 140 character quantum this could be easily misconstrued. What I was tr

My last post about whether genius required the internet for “closed” to beat “open” ended by suggesting that it was actually the passing of time – which none of us can avoid. Someone responded with the suggestion that there are some who can, in fact, avoid the passing of time

There’s been an interesting discussion brewing over the last few days. It all started with Tim Wu presenting his argument that “Open” beats “Closed”. He surmises that Apple only managed to buck the trend because of the genius of Steve Jobs – without which it will succum

Simon Schama’s “A history of Britain” is deliberately titled “A history” rather than “The history” for the simple reason that there are many versions of Britain’s history. In the same vein, this is my personal recollection based on events of which I ha

Rupert Murdoch’s bold experiment, “The Daily”, is dead. The online subscription publication will close its doors on December 15th, after operating for only 21 months. The Daily’s demise provides a great lesson about what can happen when you try to do too much. It’s not that The Daily didn’t have cus

Happy 20th Birthday, SMS. Wow, haven’t you grown?!  Sure, you’re still only 160 characters long, but none of us would have guessed 20 years ago how much a part of our lives you would become – the most widely used data application in the world with 3.6 billion active users.  By utilis

To keep or not to keep? Imagine, if you will, that it is the late 1800s and your team are designing the city of Paris, France. Your brief is to make sure that it becomes the most beautiful, romantic city in the world. Surely, any of us with even the most basic of knowledge of […]

During the first World War Winston Churchill famously lost his job as First Lord of the Admiralty as a result of the failed Gallipoli campaign (despite it not really being his fault). He then oversaw the far more difficult and arguably more important effort of taking on the Axis Powers in the second

Delaying a decision as long as possible is often a good idea! Sounds counterintuitive doesn’t it, particularly for those of us with a well developed “sense of urgency” (like me!). Real Options is about knowing when you have to make a decision. They are a great way to avoid making early decisions tha

Everywhere we look in the system for delivering value with software there are opportunities to make improvements that might work well for one part, but have a negative effect on the whole. Systems Thinking is about understanding the purpose of the whole and making improvements with the whole in mind