Making Value in Product Development
Why?
“Are we solving a problem, for a real audience, in a meaningful way?”
One of the biggest risks for teams is working with someone else representing the actual customer. It is not easy to understand and feel the customer's requirement or find a solution for a problem for which you cannot feel, or interact with the real problem.
Even if we do it on time and on budget, it won’t be valuable if we produce the wrong thing, at the wrong time, for the wrong people.
The fact that the process of understanding the problem and developing ideas is carried out outside the development team, limits the team’s ability to produce value and innovate. As a part of continuous improvement, operating the process from idea to execution in a cyclical manner in which product teams work together is essential for sustainable delivery.
Doing Valuable thing first, how?
In today’s competitive environment, product development is more challenging than ever. The goal is to deliver exceptional value efficiently and quickly, creating products that are truly reasonable to users. Everyone is emphasizing the importance of value, focusing on doing what’s most valuable first.
Customers expect effective solutions to their problems. When tackling any task, we have three options:
- Doing the right thing.
- Doing it right.
- Doing it quickly.
Problems arise when one of these dimensions is missing.
- Doing the right thing quickly with the wrong methods compromises quality and becomes a technical debt.
- Doing the right thing slowly, even with the right methods, risks missing market opportunities.
- Doing the wrong thing quickly with the right methods produces fast but useless, undesirable results.
End result is customers don’t like the product and the team, which then leads to reduced employee motivation.
When we have a hammer in our hands, we tend to see everything as a nail.
It’s essential to use the right methods for the job instead of relying on familiar ones. Design Thinking, Lean Startup, and Agile are popular value-driven approaches, each unique from the other by their different focuses on people, technology, and business areas. Using these practices together in the right balance is valuable for sustainable success in product development.
There are unknowns and uncertainties such as how to use them together, whether one replaces the other, and in what order they should be applied. It is not easy to have a consistent, sustainable journey. What is valuable is to use the practices of these approaches together in the right proportions.
Collaborating Across Teams to gain value in Product Development
In today’s complex business landscape, many organizations have multiple teams simultaneously working on different modules or components of the same product. While this approach can be highly efficient, it comes with its unique set of challenges.
The question remains: are these teams working together effectively to ensure that the entire product aligns with the vision and serves the needs of the real audience?
Coordinating efforts across teams can be a complex task, and one of the most significant risks is the potential misalignment with the customer’s perspective or the product/business vision. Often, each team may have its own representation of the customer’s needs and requirements such as product owners or business analysts. This can lead to a fragmented understanding of the overall problem, making it challenging to create a product that genuinely resonates with the end-users.
Even if each team manages to deliver their modules on time and within budget, the bigger question arises: are they producing the right components at the right time for the right people? Without effective collaboration and a shared vision, the risk of producing a product that falls short of expectations remains high.
To address this challenge, it’s essential to break it down and promote cross-team collaboration. Product development should be a holistic process that involves every team working together towards a common goal. Achieving this synergy is important for creating a product that delivers exceptional value efficiently and quickly.
Customers today expect seamless and effective solutions to their problems. When multiple teams are involved, it’s highly important to ensure that they are all aligned in doing the right things, doing them right, and doing them quickly. Misalignment in any of these dimensions can result in unexpected outcomes.
Just as within individual teams, using the right methods and approaches for coordinating across teams is more important. It’s not enough for each team to work independently, they must integrate their efforts in a way that ensures a cohesive and user-centric product. This might require implementing practices such as cross-team workshops, shared customer feedback channels, or even the adoption of Agile at scale methodologies.
In this environment, the need for a well-balanced combination of Design Thinking, Lean Startup, and Agile becomes even more critical. These approaches should extend beyond individual teams and be coordinated across the entire product development process. The challenge exists in finding the right proportions and strategies to use these practices effectively, ensuring that the collective output aligns with the customer’s needs and expectations.
As organizations navigate the complexities of having multiple teams develop modules within the same product, the key is to establish a culture of collaboration and focus on the aspects of communication, team dynamics, and customer-centric practices that are most relevant to delivering a product that solves real problems for a real audience in a meaningful way.
If you enjoyed this article and found it insightful, please consider supporting it with some 👏 claps, sharing it 🔄, and following me on LinkedIn 🔗. I value your feedback and would love to hear your opinions and ideas 💡. Don’t hesitate to comment below with topics you’re interested in or thoughts you’d like to share 💬. Let’s keep the conversation going and explore together!
If you need freelance services or consultation, please visit: https://devinsights.tech/
