Delivering New Product for Fun and Profit

Part 1 of 9: An Introduction

New software projects are filled with peril, fear, angst, and unknowns — and can also be some of the most fulfilling and rewarding work to be done. Getting from a proposed vision for a new product offering to a successful new product launch is fraught with guesswork, bad estimation, leadership alignment woes, technical assumptions that can lead to debt, and poor morale caused by increasing urgency as schedules slip or plans change.

The number of people that think they enjoy, and are good at, this type of work is high — but in practice, the number of people that actually enjoy the discomfort associated with being lost in what I call the “new product development desert” is low.

One of the primary reasons I believe that people don’t find new product development comfortable is a lack of understanding of the journey that must happen to deliver first generation projects. This series will outline the journey we take to successfully navigate from vision to launch.

On our journey there are distinct phases and turning points:

• Discovery, where we identify the customer problem and set the vision.
• Pre-work to ignite understanding, where the team begins to digest the market and technical information to understand the problem.
• The Kickoff, where we decide what is in and out of scope and identify the minimum viable system (aka, the steel thread).
• Innovation & Experimentation, where we answer our biggest technical questions and test ideas with customers.
• Customer Advisory, where we engage with customers to guide our direction. (This customer advisory group is usually set up at the same time as Innovation & Experimentation.)
• Iteration, where we build our product until it is “good enough”, continuously learning, making tough decisions, and testing with customers.
• Delivery, where we launch our product successfully.

These steps are not meant to confer any sort of waterfall decision process, but a type of map you can use to identify where you are at, and where you should try and go next.

The goal is to limit our time lost in the new product desert — a dangerous place where we aren’t sure what to do next, decision making grinds to a halt, and the organization is unsure of the value they are getting from the effort. The team that embraces each evolution will find the journey motivational and rewarding, limit their time in the desert, and gather alignment along the way.

One principle we use is that it is far better to evaluate and concede our assumptions early in the project. This map gives leadership a way to ensure that teams have safety to try ideas, see if they work, and alter course quickly (and early). Leaders should recognize that changing course is a courageous act: We are recognizing our assumptions were wrong and are correcting them. It is a great sign that the team feels psychological safety.

The ramifications of these techniques for organizations that want pre-committed deliverables is a high potential for contention. Using this process, it will be difficult for organizations to track a pre-determined checklist of committed deliverables to determine if teams are meeting expectations — this isn’t an easy ask for most orgs. In the last part of the series I’ll go into some thoughts around organizational impact, how to measure effectiveness, and how organizations can support these types of efforts.

My teams have built a track record of delivering innovative products that are on time with measurable customer value. In addition, my team has confidence in each other and in leadership’s support for the new product development effort, and feel the safety to innovate and deliver.

These tools and techniques work at scale: We have delivered multiple team projects with lots of dependencies, and delivered them early.

The techniques we’ll talk about in this series have been built up over the last couple of years by my teams. Over time our processes have jelled into something that I believe is repeatable. My hope is that you find some parts are helpful to you on your own journey!

Next: Discovery in depth, where we learn about setting a vision, finding alignment, and initializing the system.