Santa Claus and the elves crew (revisited)

Christmas is just over …

Santa Claus has already received a bunch of letters with tons of expected gifts for next Christmas and, as usual, it sounds not possible to deliver all the toys.

My Santa Claus is quite special, she’s able to discuss with children, try to help them to prioritize their wishlist. If you could pick only one present what would you choose ? Do you want a better toy but shared with another kid? And sometimes she eventually has to choose what will be the best toy for kids.

Why Santa Claus can’t afford to offer all toys? The reason is quite simple : she’s working with a crew of 13 elves doing their best to build 150 solid and ergonomic toys per Christmas … too bad … the list already contains around 1000 expected items.

Santa Claus can welcome few new elves before each Christmas but definitely not enough to craft all the toys, looks like the more the crew grows, the more the wishlist grows too and new expected presents are added to the list of the previous year presents.

Elves are smart, they train themselves, re-organize their workshop, enhance and automate their tools to be more efficient but they can’t build so much toys. Let’s clarify that they craft tailor-made game, each game is different and requires a dedicated design, we’re not talking about industrial production.

They can also temporary decrease the quality of the production but as they have to maintain the toys delivered the previous years, they cannot take the risk to spend all their time fixing old toys. Besides, they always have to deliver new toys and moreover if gifts are too fragile, children will be very disapointed.

This story sounds familiar to you ?

In my not so fantastic tale, let’s replace Christmas by release, Santa Claus by product owners, elves by developers/ux designer, children by stakeholders/customers, wishlist by product backlog and toys by features, we obtain a pretty faithful analogy of how we’re building our product.

I wish all the best and a Merry Christmas to my two favourites Santa Claus, to the crazy crew of elves and to all the children, we’re proud to do our best every day to make them happy :)