Epic Time
Product Management Fundamentals
Between incremental enhancements and a full pivot lives the epic — the massive product change released all at once. In the religion of incrementalism, a truly epic product change can be heretical. Sacred cows make the best burgers, though, and a product owner occasionally needs to fire up the grill.
The purpose of this post is to persuade you that the best justification for a product epic is when:
- Releasing changes independently detracts significant value AND
- Releasing together adds significant value
To understand this in context, let’s discuss what it means to be epic.
The origin story of an epic start with an uneasy itch. Customer feedback is being addressed, but not conclusively. Numbers may be improving, but trendlines are meh. The team is attacking the biggest problems, but the roadmap feels shackled. You see a path to level up from the local maximum. This is how an epic feels.
A challenge is that these revolutionary stirrings occur for product owners all the time. Any legit product owner obsesses about a service’s imperfections and has bold ideas for improvement. Inspiration is intoxicating, but can be treacherous. You don’t want a reputation as someone who manufactures a crisis. Your team will demand a sober persuasive justification.
To develop a credible rationale for the epic, let’s consider the persuasive arguments against it. Modern software gospel advises to break big changes into smaller ones and release each when ready. This accelerates time to market: users experience the immediate benefits of each change. You also get feedback: users respond to the early bits which can be fed back into subsequent changes.
The Lean Start-up movement behind these insights has tremendous merit. It also has flaws. To quote Bruce Lee, any technique, however worthy and desirable, becomes a disease when the mind is obsessed with it.
There are times when there’s significant value loss by releasing incrementally. Releasing changes independently can create an incongruous experience for users. When revising an onboarding process, changing one section without modifying another can undermine coherence. In a marketplace business, changes can impact buyers and sellers in an inextricable way. Trying to dance around this can diminish value and create inefficiencies.
There can also be significant value gain by releasing together. In order to create a sea change in perception or behavior, sometimes a product needs to send a shock through the system. When Facebook released Timeline, they announced a new way of thinking about your online identity. There are items within Timeline 1.0 that could have been added incrementally later. To change user perception, they sent a shock to the system by releasing a lot at once.
To debunk incrementalism for a particular circumstance, you need to explicitly refute its central merits. That’s why the best justification for an epic is that releasing independently detracts significant value and releasing together adds significant value.
To unify the team around the definition of significant value requires a common purpose — a rallying cry tied to a measurable goal. At RelayRides, a common purpose is to create a long term high quality marketplace with committed participants. The measurable goal for that is the user ratio of hassle to value (we have ways of measuring both).
If the justification for our proposed epic is air tight, there’s still lots to tee up. Getting the timing right for an epic is hugely important. We need to have socialized the underlying problems sufficiently with the right people. We need to have authentically considered the alternatives. We probably need to have done some user testing to mitigate risk. After all that, we need to tap deeply into a team’s courage, craftsmanship and collaboration. It’s epic time.
