Optimize Before Hiring More People

Geoff Scott
Aug 22, 2017 · 3 min read

If you’re like most product development managers, you have far more work to do than your team can possibly get done. In order to meet your objectives, you have to significantly grow your team, and it’s taking far too long to hire the level of talent that you need.

As you hire more people, you might want to ask yourself if your team is working as effectively as possible. Do you have any room for improvement? Most of us do have room for improvement, and if we don’t adopt a practice of continuously improving our productivity, our current inefficiencies will only multiply as they are adopted by new team members.

The book, The Phoenix Project, describes the transformational journey of an organization from slow, silo’ed, distrusting, and on the verge of failing to fast, agile, collaborative, and poised for success through the adoption of continuous improvement practices. The first step in this journey is to embrace Systems Thinking, which you can start by gaining a deeper understanding of the various kinds of work that that your product organization handles.

Most product organizations need to handle four kinds of work: product enhancements, operational improvements, maintenance, and unplanned work. A highly effective product organization maximizes capacity to work on product enhancements by investing in operational improvements to streamline maintenance work and minimize unplanned work.

Note that some B2B product organizations also perform client implementation and customization work, which is often directly tied to revenue. This will be the topic of another post.

Product Enhancements

Product enhancements directly deliver business value. They are usually derived from a broader product/business vision, strategy, and roadmap that is informed by market research and customer feedback. Enhancements are represented as collections of epics comprised of user stories, each including acceptance criteria.

Operational Improvements

Operational improvements are investments that impact your organization’s ability to complete work and ultimately accelerate its ability to deliver business value. Examples include building tools and practices to rapidly validate hypothetical features (building the right product), improving feedback loops, speeding up automated tests, refactoring/re-architecting (building the product right), and automating routine patching and compliance testing.

Maintenance

Maintenance is required work that is necessary to continue operating your business, like conducting security scans and patching operating systems. You can use operational improvements reduce maintenance work by automating it as much as possible, so that it all gets done with as little impact to your team’s capacity for product enhancements as possible.

Unplanned Work

Unplanned work is waste that should be minimized, consisting of both bug fixes and rework from missed requirements. It’s far less expensive to completely eliminate defects and rework earlier in the development process by having clear acceptance criteria, investing in solid unit test coverage, and validating features before building them.

Need help accelerating product development? We’re the experts! Contact us at Hackerati for lean and agile product strategy, DevOps transformation, experience design, architecture, and engineering services.

Hackerati

A company of premier technology consultants that Code & Craft transformative Data, Web, Mobile and Infrastructure strategies, products and solutions that accelerate business.

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Geoff Scott

Written by

Entrepreneur, engineer, builder of technology teams, products, and companies utilizing a lean product, agile engineering approach.

Hackerati

Hackerati

A company of premier technology consultants that Code & Craft transformative Data, Web, Mobile and Infrastructure strategies, products and solutions that accelerate business.

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