Alignment is King
To achieve your product’s goals, you have to be crystal clear
The effort and tasks of any product team are sometimes daunting. You need to make agreements (usually verbal and on-the-fly) to distribute the work correctly in order to reach any goal or milestone.
Being as clear and transparent as is humanly possible ensures the success of the product being developed. That is why I follow a quick three-step process to ensure everyone around me is following through on what was agreed upon:
- Make a decision.
- Set a timeline.
- Secure mutual agreement.
It all starts with a decision
There is a reason why decide comes from the Latin root caedere, meaning “to kill”; it is because once you start making decisions, you start killing all the alternative options you could potentially make.
For product managers deciding to go with the bronze version of an analyzed feature scope, it means killing the silver and gold versions of it. For designers and developers, as well.
I said it all starts with a decision; in the real world, it all really starts with a meeting. You convene all the appropriate stakeholders to implement the feature, and you decide what version of the scope will be adopted. After agreeing to what is to be done, there is no going back; you have killed all other options.
Software development is a messy process, but it should also be fun — or else what’s the point!? It’s OK to revise specs and details every day during “in progress” time and make adjustments along the way, but remember, you do this at the peril of slowing down team progress. It happens to me all the time. The question I ask myself before announcing any changes to the acceptance criteria is: Is this worth delaying the release for 1 or 2 days, or can it wait for the next release? Next year?
Unity vs. division
The degree to which a team can stay united vs. divided during implementation depends on the duration of each release cycle and the confidence to deliver what was agreed upon by each team member.
From my experience, 6-week cycles always feel like the right amount of time to implement something really valuable for the end-user and still have the feeling of rapid iterations. By the time the first day of a new cycle comes around, “The Meeting” will have happened, and the team will have decided what chunk of work they will implement against specifications.
More than 6 weeks, and the team starts showing division over petty details. Less than 6 weeks, and people feel choked with work to deliver a good solution.
Secure an agreement
During the next meeting you have, be it a stakeholder buy-in, kickoff with devs, design walk-through, prioritization, leads, architectural decision or anything in between, make sure sure you secure an agreement at the end.
Each team member has a very distinct role to reach that goal, with product and design usually coming first, setting the acceptance criteria and overall design, with the devs casting the mold to release a small (or large) feature into a testing environment. Quality testing usually comes right afterward to ensure the user gets a refined experience, but that is a whole other topic for another day.
Just remember: Alignment is king and rules over the progress of every product. Keep the king happy.
