Defining value: the most ambiguous word in product development

One of my favourite questions to ask any new client is, “How do you measure success?” I pose this question to product teams, discipline heads and executives to understand what the organisation values and what they reward. One hundred percent of the time the initial response is, “That’s a great question.”

After giving it some thought the responses evolve into some variation of “we shipped a [thing]” where [thing] is whatever that person is responsible for creating — a product, a feature, a system, a policy or an initiative. My follow-up question is then always, “How do you know that this was the right [thing] to ship or that it was designed and developed well?” At this point, the answers fall into two camps (in most situations). One half of the responses end up being, “We don’t.” I like this camp. They’re the honest ones. They know that beyond getting [thing] implemented there is no further evaluation of it. The other half inevitably say, “We know it was right because we delivered value.”

And this is where their story starts to fall apart.

“Value” is the most ambiguous word in business. It means something different to every person that says it, primarily based on where they’re positioned in an organisation. Executives talk mostly about business value. Customer-facing product teams use the phrase customer value though there are still many teams I come across who speak in terms of business value. Finally, internally-facing teams — this includes teams like…