Imagine sitting down in September of 2019 and creating a detailed plan of ever one of your company’s projects for 2020. I recently met with a company doing just that. In September of each year, the company starts the two-month process of approving detailed projects for the next year. Those formalized plans are presented to management early November for final reviews, so the company knows what it’s building starting in January. If things change, or you need a different project? No problem, write it down, we’ll start planning again next September.
The real key here isn’t that the company was looking into the future (we have to). The problem is the view was too tightly defined. If you haven’t guessed yet, there are some issues with this approach:
- No year has looked quite like 2020, but every year brings changes. Teams who realize they’re working on the wrong solutions are dinged if they don’t deliver the right project, with no budget to deliver the right one. Hopefully, this year is helping companies see the issue with trying to have detailed plans a year plus in advance.
- Leadership is coming up with and prioritizing the solution. As I mentioned in The Power of Not Knowing, customers may know their pain points, but they don’t know what the solution is. Teams have ideas, but they won’t know for sure till customers provide feedback. The best solutions come from the two working together. Leadership is great for facilitating this process and coaching on the approach, but not for creating the solution in a vacuum.
- There is nothing in this process to judge if all these projects are adding any value. Research shows that 80% of features are either seldom or never used, but the only measure of success is if the feature was completed and delivered. Unless the problem is big enough to impact profits, nobody notices. That leaves a lot of room for mediocre features customers just ignore.
- Companies are running as hard as they can to deliver 100% of features that will deliver 20% of the value. We’re so focused on getting all of the 100% done that we don’t take time to focus on what efforts are adding the most value.
If one extreme is over planning, the other extreme, which I frequently see when management asks teams to go Agile, is under-planning. Leadership stands up a team and tells them to finish the project. What project the team asks? Well you’re Agile – figure it out. It’s another recipe for failure. Teams at least need to be told where to focus so they can do what they do best, problem solving.
If the answer isn’t long term roadmaps or just letting teams explore, what are companies supposed to do?
The answer comes out of product management.
Understanding Product Management
In Scrum – there’s a lot of focus on the scrum master, and far less on product owners. It’s a new role for most companies used to leveraging business analysts for requirements definition. However, it’s more established in consumer-based companies. One of the side benefits of Agile is the role is getting a lot more attention.
Product management is the process of developing a product that customers love. It’s defining who the customer is, gaining a deep understanding of needs, and researching ways to better meet those need before the customer even knows they have them. At it’s heart, product management is serving customers, which should be at the core of every company.
Long Term Planning
As we’re trying to improve the process, the good news is that product focused roadmaps don’t require a lot of adjustments, and in ways are a lot easier.
As I mentioned before, the first change is realizing what we don’t know, and focusing on what we do. We may not know what the solutions are, but if we are listening to customers, we know their top problems. Prioritizing and listing which problems we’ll focus on is a great way to develop a long-term strategic plan.
The next change is adding some flexibility. The one thing we know about predicting the future is we will never be 100% right. Having a prioritized list of problems provides needed structure, but there should be a realization something bigger could come up. Instead of funding specific problems, companies can fund a specific group, prioritize problems, and do so with a process to adjust priorities as things change. Because teams haven’t created a detailed scope plan till they start working on the problem, there’s less waste when priorities need adjusted.
The last change is perhaps the most difficult. We need to measure success in customer value, not in delivered features. On time, on budget, in scope are the go-to measurements for one specific reason – they’re easy. But that doesn’t make them effective. One of the best things teams do is solve problems, so leverage them to think about this one. A simple way to start looking at value is building measurement into your product to see what customers are using today (and how often they are using it). Another measurement can include conversations with end users (not their representatives, the ones using the product). The gold standard is watching someone use the product in their native environment.
Conclusion
There is good news for that company doing annual planning. You can get idea of what’s coming and where to fund without wasting two concentrated months creating the wrong roadmap. That’s a lot of time freed up to focus on more productive efforts. They’ll still need to think about details, it will be a lot easier when it’s focused on the next specific problems they’re facing now, not next year. More importantly, if they get products in front of customers quickly and focus on measuring value, leadership doesn’t have to hope black box projects are hitting the mark. They can see the value in customer’s eyes quickly (a couple weeks into the quarter, not at the end of the year), and have room to adjust where they focus now, instead of at the end of the year.