The bias in backlogs

There is a bias in backlogs and roadmaps that is very hard to budge. It’s natural and completely understandable, and companies deal with it in different ways.

The bias is towards urgency and known value, at the expense of speculation and innovation. Let’s imagine you are prioritising a simple roadmap and the three items you have to consider are:

• A new feature required by a major new client who will be going live in 2 months
• Automating a manual process that will reduce costs by 10% in the customer service team
• An idea someone had for a potential new feature that could persuade some customers to upgrade to a higher plan

I think I’ve probably already got those in the right order. Spin forward a couple of months and you’re now faced with these three items:

• Reimplementing a core feature that simply won’t scale any more and is causing daily negative feedback because it is criminally slow
• Integrating with a new supplier that is going to give you 2% more revenue on every single transaction you push through them
• An idea someone had for a potential new feature that could persuade some customers to upgrade to a higher plan

Do you see what I mean? In the pressure cooker of the roadmap, the speculative item always loses out to the urgent items and the “known” value-adds. After all, this idea might turn out to be impossible to build, it might be a flawed idea no-one wants, it might only persuade a bare handful to upgrade. Or… it could increase upgrades by 50% and suddenly become Marketing’s favourite new toy and the one thing our product is best known for! Who knows?

We’ll never find out, though, because it will always be loitering down the roadmap, filed under “we’d all love to do this, but hand on heart, it’s really not our highest priority right now…” How many times have you heard that phrase? Me, a lot.

Companies deal with this in different ways. I think it’s a common kick-starter for “innovation teams” — somebody senior just gets fed up with their pet projects never seeing the light of day, because they keep being very sensibly pushed down the priority list. So they create an innovation team.

At Click Travel we’ve gone instead with “pop-up teams” — at any time there are 2–3 engineers who have popped out of their usual teams to work on an exciting speculative project. At the end of the project they return to their teams, and if the project was a success one of the engineers takes ownership of the new thing back with them. It amounts to the same as an innovation team, i.e. about 5% of our total team are working on “innovation” at any time, but it allows everyone to get involved.

These are both solutions to the bias inherent in backlogs and roadmaps. I think an even better solution would be to recognise the bias and work out an approach that allows speculative work to take its share of the top spot on everyone’s roadmaps. I haven’t worked that out yet, but here are some of the characteristics that would be important:

• Senior leaders must support it, either directly if they are involved in roadmap prioritisation, or indirectly if they set the focus and environment; if 3 weeks are spent on a speculative feature and it is thrown away a failure, no-one should take a fall for that
• You have to be able to move fast. The time spent getting the MVP of a speculative new thing in front of real users is the company’s “stake” — no-one likes making a bet if the stakes are too high
• Metrics are king. Urgent & pre-approved work can be lazy about this: we “know” we need to do it, so measuring success can seem like a luxury. But if you’re spending valuable time on a speculative feature you have an absolute responsibility to measure how successful the bet was

I’d be very interested to know if anyone else recognises this bias, and even more interested to know how you’ve tackled it.

Footnote: what do we “know”?

I’ve put the word “know” in quotes a couple of times in this article. Why? Well, because all those things that we “know” are urgent, or “know” will add value… I don’t believe we do. I can find plenty of instances where something super-urgent turned out suddenly not to be. And plenty of figures like “10% cost saving” backed by figures and graphs that hang on the flimsiest of assumptions. I have an inkling that the truly enlightened company is the one that realises that almost every piece of work is full of unknowns and essentially a bet.