Two impactful ideas to apply in software product development (part 2)

This post is a follow-up to:

Two impactful ideas to apply in software product development

In this follow-up post, I provide more details of two ideas that, in my experience, are important to establish a context that is specific enough for all parts of an organisation to align and contribute to creating a positive impact.

This sounds like an incredibly obvious concept. So obvious, everyone must be doing it. But I challenge you to interrogate what is happening in your organisation and see if you can honestly say this is being achieved.

Specifically, are you communicating clearly;

1. The longer-term outcome desired
   Have a statement you and your collaborators can agree on, free of weasel words and describe an outcome that describes an improved reality for your target audience. This might be a vision document, a result as defined in PuMP, an OKR defined for a longer timeframe such as 3–5 years, or any of a myriad of ways. When we are clear and aligned on what we are seeking to achieve, we can achieve amazing results!
2. The shorter-term outcomes which are needed to support this goal. This could be a result as defined in PuMP, an outcome-oriented OKR or any other form of expressing a goal that is specific enough that the probability that any given two collaborators' understanding is similar enough to be pulling together in the same direction most of the time.
3. How they relate to each other and the long-term outcome. This might be expressed with a Result Map as defined in PuMP, a map of the relationships between outcome-oriented OKRs, an opportunity tree, a pre-requisite tree (as defined in Theory of Constraints) or any other goal relationship approach.

I am not sure there is any single method for doing this well, I only know what worked well for the teams I worked with — we used the Result Map notation that Stacey Barr developed for PuMP and documented our outcome-oriented objectives (and potential objectives) onto this format. This included some very long-term objectives which described the long-term success of our business.

The key thing here is that we can interrogate the chain of causality — i.e. what things need to be true for a more macro outcome to be achieved. For instance, a segment of a chain might look like this:

More on causal chains and result maps in a later post.

This is a very high-level summary — there are many writing about approaches to understanding customer needs so I will just outline some key parts. Use your methodology of choice when seeking to address these questions.

1. What are your customer’s needs and what problems do they face? (Jobs-to-be-done, continuous discovery, outcome-driven innovation etc.)
2. Which of these needs or problems if addressed support progress towards the outcomes that are important for your organisation’s success? (various strategy tools, Wardley mapping etc.)
3. What are the options for addressing these? (opportunity solution trees, impact mapping etc.)

There are many frameworks and approaches for achieving each of the above and in later posts, I will elaborate on some of these with examples. Addressing some of these fundamental questions but not others won’t prevent you from making progress.

Not addressing all of these will make it unlikely you are optimum in decision-making on prioritisation because you will not be assessing how your customer’s needs intersect with the purpose and strategy of your organisation. How the answers to these questions interrelate is key to identifying a path to succeeding competitively and being able to communicate the logic behind what you seek to achieve to make progress.

Join the Discord community! Are all of these concepts in use at your organisation? Which specific practices are you using? Which practices work well together? Share your experiences in the comments.

Originally published at https://wioota.substack.com.