Start at your destination!
In the last 20 years, I’ve been fortunate to work on a number of different software projects. Earlier in my career, I was usually contributing to a plan that someone else had defined. This made it easy to understand exactly what was required. It was all mapped out for me. I just had to build my part.
At the time, I don’t think I appreciated how much effort goes into planning a successful product. Since I was the person writing the code, I foolishly assumed that I was the one doing all of the heavy lifting. Of course, with some maturity, I realized that good products come from great teams and that no single role can make something truly exciting. It really does take a village.
As a programmer, I’ve always had a sort of innate ability to break problems down into consumable chunks. As I matured, I realized that this skill would come in quite handy, especially as I moved into management. With each promotion through the ranks of management, you’re essentially signing up to deal with more ambiguity. There often are multiple answers to a question. Of course, not all of questions are of equal importance.
The average adult makes 35,000 decisions every day. With that many decisions to make, the first thing to determine is importance. Where possible, delegating decision making can help your team to feel more invested in the outcome of a given project. People need to feel involved in the process. No one enjoys being micromanaged or told how to do their job. You hired smart people, so enable them.
Sometimes, when delegating, it can be overwhelming to the recipient. They need coaching and guidance as to how to approach things. Many things can cause this overload, not enough information, too much information, too many stakeholders, vested interests and too much or lack of emotional investment. Often, they will look back to me to help them break down the problem.
In these situations, I find myself turning back to some incredibly simple tools. The first, and probably my favorite of the bunch, is the work-back plan. Building a work-back plan is simple. I start by visualizing the destination. If we accomplish whatever we’re hoping to accomplish, what would the world look like? Once we know where we’re going, we just need to figure out how to get there. What milestones or waypoints should we pass through to know that we’re moving towards our goal.
Once we have our milestones, we then need to establish a timeline. A timeline does two things. Of course, it helps us to understand when we might be done, but more interestingly, it also helps those doing the work understand, at a high level, how much effort to spend in each phase. You’ve probably heard the phrase, “nature abhors a vacuum”, or said differently, the scope of work will inevitably expand to fill the time available. I like to use a mixture of top down and bottoms up scoping to ensure that we’re in alignment around the effort. This means involving the team and getting their input. If the top down and bottoms up scoping efforts don’t align, it usually means that we have different views of what a milestone entails.
So now, we have the milestones, and a general idea of duration. It’s time to start breaking things down into user or job stories. These stories focus on outcomes. We don’t want to prematurely discuss implementation. Telling people what to implement is a surefire way to stifle their creativity and often a great way to miss the mark in terms of what gets implemented. A good story provides context so that an engineer can feel empowered and creative.
In a functional organization, product marketing define the markets and the customers within those markets, product management frame and define the problems to be solved for those customers, and engineers build creative solutions to address those problems in ways that the customer might never have expected. As a manager of people, understanding your role and making space for your peers and your team is critical to achieving success.
I’d love to hear how you approach problems within your organization!
👋🏻Hey there — I’m Zac
And I’m on a mission…
To help 1 million people become more impactful leaders. I do this by speaking, writing and mentoring on the topic. Do you want to be a better leader — you must know how to use your passion and to create space for those around you. Join other leaders and sign up for email updates.
