Never waste a good crisis — part 6— Collected lessons and how these relate to Product development

What a crisis teaches us about planning & prioritisation

What can this teach us when thinking about Product development? I will walk through the concepts and takeaways that this live example of COVID-19, which touches every business and every consumer, can teach us.

Start part 1 here of my 6 part series here:

Never waste a good crisis — part 1 — How can we learn from a crisis?

Collected lessons and how these relate to Product development

Think of these in the context of your own product and organisation. Through analysis of the usual state and the extraordinary state during a crisis we have established:

1. When we understand the value of something makes the value of addressing it more certain, helps establish what progress looks like and can function as an incentive.
2. Being explicit and clear in the purpose of all parts of our organisation and how they add up to address the organisations purpose is important to optimal performance.
3. Many current practices of organisations do not stand up to scrutiny or indeed when tested by reality. Bias can lead to blind spots in this and thus we should assume this is true until proven otherwise.
4. We should prioritise time investment into fulfilling our purpose and addressing what we have determined to be valuable.
5. The only meaningful measures of progress are through indicators that are evidence of realising the value we seek.

…and when you do have a crisis

Crises can be of different magnitudes. For every global pandemic, there are smaller crises which may impact something more localised. It could be a catastrophic failure of a product feature you are responsible for or a change in the market which threatens your market position. So remember:

‘Never waste a good crisis’

1. In the moment, use it to rally people around a common direction.
2. Assess potential risks which could materialise into the next crisis and use the understanding of these threats and the realisation of a previous crisis to rally people around how addressing these may sit in relation to other pools of value you established using the lessons in this post.
3. After the fact review what it tells you about your organisation and what assumptions are worth challenging.

This has been part of a continuing series of posts:

Never waste a good crisis — part 1 — How can we learn from a crisis?

Never waste a good crisis — part 2 — COVID-19 and what we can learn

Never waste a good crisis — part 3 — Failures & how we addressed them can teach us evergreen…

Never waste a good crisis — part 4 — Crises help us challenge assumptions and why that may be

Never waste a good crisis — part 5 — A crisis can be leveraged by leaders to rally support

Never waste a good crisis — part 6 — Collected lessons and how these relate to Product development