How to be Innovative Without Deadlines

Over the last 8 years, I’ve used my product management and software development skills to turn an initial concept into a multi-million pound service, handling thousands of requests per second from users all around the world.

During the process of creating a successful SaaS product, I’ve found that it’s more important to focus on working on the right tasks, rather than spending time trying to guess when something will be ready.

I’m now applying this way of thinking at my startup, Swiftcomplete, where it’s really important to maintain focus and build relationships with customers to successfully deliver our product vision.

Focus on solving the underlying difficult problems

Innovating is hard. Combining a raw idea, customer feedback and what is technically possible and then converting it into an achievable product roadmap is a difficult, time consuming and skilled task.

It’s easy to procrastinate and spend time estimating user stories, monitoring team velocity and drawing burn-down charts, but this is not valuable to your customers and does not help to deliver your product vision.

Often, deadlines and other metrics can be imposed to pressure a development team into working faster, particularly when a project is perceived to be struggling.

Forcing the issue with imposed deadlines, timeboxed releases and excessive monitoring is one approach to get something released, but it doesn’t address the common problem that projects tend to struggle due to a lack of a clear vision, not slow developers.

Getting the content of your releases right is the most valuable area to focus your resources on — everything else is avoiding the issue

I prefer to attack the root cause, by having a development team that feel like they are working on something useful, feel ownership of a complex problem and are directly contributing to a clear product vision.

Keep colleagues and customers happy by managing their expectations. Do this by communicating with them frequently, breaking your product vision down into small, cohesive releases and giving ownership to the development team, supporting them to release as often as possible.

If you’re responsible for delivering a product vision, the most important thing to get right is what you should be working on, not when you should deliver it by

There will be times where committing to a deadline is unavoidable due to external factors, such as complying with new regulations. This is to be expected, but try to avoid relying on setting arbitrary deadlines as your day-to-day method of getting releases finished, particularly if you’re trying to foster a culture of innovation.

For long-term growth, focus on quality, not dates

Once you’ve set your product vision and created an initial roadmap, I recommend not committing to hard dates for your releases, as it restricts the teams’ ability to work on the most valuable tasks. This is particularly relevant for projects which require a lot of R&D, or for startups that are trying to establish product/market fit.

It isn’t always possible to be innovative on demand

My preference is to deliver high-quality, valuable releases that will delight customers, rather than releasing unfinished or buggy products to meet an arbitrary deadline.

Delivery of your product vision should be a process where you will continuously learn and re-prioritise based on feedback, but your ability to do this will be restricted if you’ve already committed to delivering a certain piece of functionality by a certain date.

Conversely, you may need to pull a release forwards, to meet requirements for a customer who is looking to use your product. You won’t be able to do this if you’ve a agreed a rigid roadmap with fixed dates and ordering.

You need to be able to respond to current feedback and priorities, rather than what was important earlier in the year

It’s even worth avoiding publishing quarters, such as ‘Q4’, as you may find that Q4 arrives and there are more valuable tasks to be working on than what was agreed 8 months ago.

No-one wins when you work on something that is no longer valuable, just because it was committed to several months ago

Strike the balance between listening to feedback and becoming reactive

In the same way that it’s beneficial to not publish dates, it’s also useful to not specify the sequence of your releases.

As you begin incrementally implementing your product vision, adoption of your product should increase, along with the volume of feature requests and customer feedback.

You will need to carefully manage your current priorities and the order in which releases will be delivered, to take advantage of the growing flow of feedback, whilst maintaining creative control and avoiding ad-hoc tasks.

Maintaining the ability to deliver what is important now, rather than what you committed to several months ago, will significantly increase your chances of successfully delivering your product vision

Summary

Setting arbitrary deadlines and enforcing timeboxed releases is the easy option, but not necessarily the right option. Taking the time to truly understand your customers’ requirements and to plan an ambitious roadmap is difficult, but creates a positive working culture and gives you the best chance of succesfully delivering your product vision.

I’m the founder of tech startup Swiftcomplete.

If you’d like to have a chat about product management, startups or a demo of our innovative search technology, head over to swiftcomplete.com or message me on Twitter @chriswinfielduk or LinkedIn

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