In an annual review, a board meeting, or even just a recurring check-in, scrutiny is too often disproportionately on features and dates – the stakeholders’ favorite initiatives and when they will be “done.” They want big ideas and a timeline.
89% of product teams we have surveyed feel stuck operating as a "feature factory" all or some of the time. They are focused on executing an endless assembly line of features. This dysfunction is consistently among the most widespread dysfunctions, along with its close cousin the “hamster wheel” – running without getting anywhere.
Besides being exhausting, a focus on outputs over outcomes over-produces the wrong features. This clutters the user experience with features that get launched despite low adoption, and slows development by expanding what the team needs to maintain. The team keeps taking big swings at new ideas, believing that the next feature will be the silver bullet that solve the customer’s problems – despite past performance not justifying this confidence.
What’s missing? Impact – the material improvement of the product’s value proposition. Are the features delivered moving the needle on the product’s overall North Star metric? Is the team making continual progress on the key drivers of customer and business value?
Improving your feature production line
The antidote to this is a series of things that are common sense – but not common practice. Probably you have heard many of these concepts before, or even believe them to be true. However, are you consistently following all of them? From our observations and surveys, the answer is probably no.
The good news is that they probably don’t require a radical overhaul of the team or product strategy, just the discipline to instill these basics and iterate on your own approach.
The feature factory metaphor is valid in that you are managing a type of production process. Although each feature is a unique SKU getting created for the first time, many general operations principles can be applied to improve how you approach your work. In particular, you can look to lean manufacturing for concepts to evolve your focus and produce a higher throughput of stronger, faster results.
In other words, retool your feature factory to become an IMPACT factory.
Some key elements of that and how to apply them are as follows.
Clarify the goal |
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Manage your team by its constraints |
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Instill continuous improvement |
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Reduce work in process |
In your feature production process, what are you producing – and why?
Too frequently, teams confuse means with ends. They have an extensive backlog of vague, one-line feature ideas that sound nice, and constantly get asked by stakeholders about dates for each person’s pet project. This creates a perverse incentive to just focus on building as fast as possible. These teams fear any perceived inefficiencies, so they work to keep engineers as busy as possible..
However, features are means to an end. Engineering utilization is a means to an end. Both have the purpose of 1) improving customer value in ways that 2) help the business make money – now and in the future.
Rather than just focusing on churning through the backlog, pause to reframe and align on the goal.
Our book Build What Matters focuses on defining a vision and the associated key outcomes. A great starting point is defining and getting alignment on your team’s Outcome KPI Pyramid.
For early stage startups these may be less certain – particularly until you achieve product market fit. However even the exercise of defining these and running experiments can be clarifying. Ultimately you want to be able to evaluate 1) can you move the needle on your key metrics and 2) when you do, does that result in customer and business traction?
Every production process has its bottlenecks, which determine its overall throughput. This can be a good way to think about your product development process: Improving productivity or outputs in some areas have a disproportionate impact on achieving your overall objectives.
Once you have identified the most critical metrics to improve, are you set up to make consistent progress on these? Again, progress is defined as improving your key metrics. Usually this means investment in a focused, ongoing program, not merely by delivery of a specific feature.
Some potential areas evaluate in order to work through your bottlenecks:
Factories – and product teams – are dynamic environments where bottlenecks shift continually. Similarly, the products that customers need shift from both internal factors (e.g. other parts of your platform) and external factors (e.g. innovation by partners and competitors). What has worked in the past is informative but no guarantee in the future. Equally important is to identify, learn from, and act on what hasn’t worked.
Areas to focus on here are consistency in terms of treating each sprint and launch as a learning opportunity:
Many product and engineering teams resemble a factory floor with piles of unfinished inventory and partially assembled products. While these are the components of product development, having a surplus of any leads to a host of problems: long lead times, launch complexity, delayed product improvements, missed learnings, being late to market, and even work obsolescence.
For feature development, this is most evident in a Jira board though work in process can include many things beyond feature tickets. Consider also plans, a backlog of commitments, designs, or any other part of the process that is not yet in the hands of customers, subject to change, or perhaps even wrong.
In some ways, the worst state of a large feature getting developed is 95% complete. The team has incurred most of the effort to build it, but has realized 0% of the value. Even worse, there is a reasonable chance that it won’t meet customer needs, and learning this as early as possible can add value by informing other related decisions.
Many factories have adopted the principles of lean manufacturing in order to manage inventory while increasing their throughput, such as smaller batch sizes and just in time production. Some of these concepts appear in the principles behind the Agile Manifesto, e.g. “early and continuous delivery of valuable software” and “preference to the shorter timescale.”
Some concepts that you can apply to your team include:
Probably you have heard many of the concepts above. Perhaps you are even doing some of them. By design, these are things that you can likely start right away and often without needing any special permission.
No regret moves largely mirror the sections above.
As always, we are here to support you in these things as well as building on the foundations.
Feel free to email me at david@prodify.group or request a call.