From Projects to Products

best-practices opinion

  • Problems with Project Culture

    • Focus on delivering some output by a specific date.

    • Time spent making decisions on team size, estimations, funding.

    • Invariably, not much focus on providing real value but on getting something shipped.

    • After shipping, focus is again on team size, estimation and funding instead of iterating over the product.

  • It gets worse

    • People move to new assignments; ownership is lost, learnings from the effort are lost.

    • Rarely get funding for more than the first attempt, and even if you do, it’s usually multiple quarters later.

    • No real ownership of the technology and the outcomes.

      • People are assigned just for the duration of the project.

      • Little incentive to worry about building something impactful.

    • All about delivering the features and projects that the stakeholders are asking for.

      • No investigation into what is possible.

      • Any form of innovation is exceptionally rare with projects.

    • No one worries about the longer-term impact of this work, or improving the underlying technology, so tech debt rapidly accumulates.

    • Ownership is usually dispersed among multiple stakeholders, and the most likely consequence is to blame the project team for doing a poor job.

    • Time-to-Market is important, not Time-to-Money.

  • The product model, focus is on products and outcomes.

    • Focuses on business outcomes, like reducing churn rates, or improving growth, or whatever the relevant KPI’s are.

    • Team is constantly working to monitor and improve those results.

    • Not just shipping features.

    • Time-to-Money is important not just Time-to-Market.

    • Teams continue with the product and do not disband. Context and learning is not lost. Improves Code quality. Reduces waste.

References