How to Know You Have a Well Defined Minimum Viable Product

Conceptually, the idea of a minimum viable product (MVP) is easy to grasp. Early in a project, it’s a deliverable that reflects some semblance to the final product such that it’s barely able to stand on it’s own without lots of hand-holding and explanation for the customer’s benefit. In short, it’s terrible, buggy, and unstable. By design, MVPs lack features that may eventually prove to be essential to the final product. And we deliberately show the MVP to the customer!

We do this because the MVP is the engine that turns the build-measure-learn feedback loop. The key here is the “learn” phase. The essential features to the final product are often unclear or even unknown early in a project. Furthermore, they are largely undefinable or unknowable without multiple iterations through the build-measure-learn feedback cycle with the customer early in the process.

So early MVPs aren’t very good. They’re also not very expensive. This, too, is by design because an MVP’s very raison d’être is to test the assumptions we make early on in a project. They are low budget experiments that follow from a simple strategy:

State the good faith assumptions about what the customer wants and needs.
Describe the tests the MVP will satisfy that are capable of measuring the MVP’s impact on the stated assumptions.
Build an MVP that tests the assumptions.
Evaluate the results.

If the assumptions are not stated and the tests are vague, the MVP will fail to achieve it’s purpose and will likely result in wasted effort.

The “product” in “minimum viable product” can be almost anything: a partial or early design flow, a wireframe, a collection of simulated email exchanges, the outline to a user guide, a static screen mock-up, a shell of screen panels with placeholder text that can nonetheless be navigated – anything that can be placed in front of a customer for feedback qualifies as an MVP. In other words, a sprint can contain multiple MVPs depending on the functional groups involved with the sprint and the maturity of the project. As the project progresses, the individual functional group MVPs will begin to integrate and converge on larger and more refined MVPs, each gaining in stability and quality.

MVPs are not an end unto themselves. They are tangible evidence of the development process in action. The practice of iteratively developing MVPs helps develop to skill of rapid evaluation and learning among product owners and agile delivery team members. A buggy, unstable, ugly, bloated, or poorly worded MVP is only a problem if it’s put forward as the final product. The driving goal behind iterative MVPs is not perfection, rather it is to support the process of learning what needs to be developed for the optimal solution that solves the customer’s problems.

“Unlike a prototype or concept test, an MVP is designed not just to answer product design or technical questions. Its goal is to test fundamental business hypotheses.” – Eric Ries, The Lean Startup

So how might product owners and Agile teams begin to get a handle on defining an MVP? There are several questions the product owner and team can ask of themselves, in light of the product backlog, that may help guide their focus and decisions. (Use of the following term “stakeholders” can mean company executives or external customers.)

Identify the likely set of stakeholders who will be attending the sprint review. What will these stakeholders need to see so that they can offer valuable feedback? What does the team need to show in order to spark the most valuable feedback from the stakeholders?
What expectations have been set for the stakeholders?
Is the distinction clear between what the stakeholders want vs what they need?
Is the distinction clear between high and low value? Is the design cart before the value horse?
What are the top two features or functions the stakeholders will be expecting to see? What value – to the stakeholders – will these features or functions deliver?
Will the identified features or functions provide long term value or do they risk generating significant rework down the road?
Are the identified features or functions leveraging code, content, or UI/UX reuse?

Recognizing an MVP – Less is More

Since an MVP can be almost anything, it is perhaps easier to begin any conversation about MVPs by touching on the elements missing from an MVP.

An MVP is not a quality product. Using any generally accepted definition of “quality” in the marketplace, an MVP will fail on all accounts. Well, on most accounts. The key is to consider relative quality. At the beginning of a sprint, the standards of quality for an MVP are framed by the sprint goals and objectives. If it meets those goals, the team has successfully created a quality MVP. If measured against the external marketplace or the quality expectations of the customer, the MVP will almost assuredly fail inspection.

Your MVPs will probably be ugly, especially at first. They will be missing features. They will be unstable. Build them anyway. Put them in front of the customer for feedback. Learn. And move on to the next MVP. Progressively, they will begin to converge on the final product that is of high quality in the eyes of the customer. MVPs are the stepping stones that get you across the development stream and to the other side where all is sunny, beautiful, and stable. (For more information on avoiding the trap of presupposing what a customer means by quality and value, see “The Value of ‘Good Enough’“)

An MVP is not permanent. Agile teams should expect to throw away several, maybe even many, MVPs on their way to the final product. If they aren’t, then it is probable they are not learning what they need to about what the customer actually wants. In this respect, waste can be a good, even important thing. The driving purpose of the MVP is to rapidly develop the team’s understanding of what the customer needs, the problems they are expecting to have solved, and the level of quality necessary to satisfy each of these goals.

MVPs are not the truth. They are experiments meant to get the team to the truth. By virtue of their low-quality, low-cost nature, MVPs quickly shake out the attributes to the solution the customer cares about and wants. The solid empirical foundation they provide is orders of magnitude more valuable to the Agile team than any amount of speculative strategy planning or theoretical posturing.

Photo by Sarah Dorweiler on Unsplash

Running Daily Scrums With Remote Teams

The dialog about the value of daily scrum meetings is as vigorous as ever. I hope it never gets settled. That’s because I frequently argue both sides. Just not at the same time. Which side I’m on depends entirely on the context. If the team composed of a single functional domain that has worked together for an extended period of time while co-located in a tuned collaboration work environment, then scrums of any frequency are probably a waste of time. If the team is for the most part remote and composed of independent contractors representing multiple functional domains, than it can be argued that daily scrums become THE most important scrum meeting.

I want to talk about the latter scenario in this post. Remote scrums can be the most challenging meetings for a scrum master to facilitate. (In the interests of space, I’ll have to set aside cultural and language issues that are frequently an issue while running scrum with remote teams. I do this not to minimize the importance of these issues, but to recognize they are worthy of much better treatment than I can cover here.)

Remember the agile manifesto? The first two line read:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation

Simply stated: Don’t bother taking notes during a scrum. Not as a group, anyway. Individual agile delivery team members are certainly free to do so if it helps their individual efforts. Scrum notes are a false crutch. It’s as near to a 100% guarantee one can get to say that no one will every go back and re-read scrum notes. If someone is demanding scrum notes be taken, suspect a waterfall zombie in your midst and respond accordingly. Worse yet is that the poor agile delivery team member tasked with serving as scribe is going to be so busy trying to capture stuff they will miss much of the conversation and information exchange that makes a quality scrum so vital.

Good Practices

Early in a project the scrum master should specifically call out team members during the scrum and do so in a different order each day. This will prevent team members from talking over one another as they miss the visual cues that tell people meeting in person who is likely to speak next. Changing up the order keeps the whole team alert as they will not know when their name will be called. As the team gains experience with each other, switch to calling out the name of the team member who’ll kick off the scrum conversation. When they’ve completed informing the team what they’ve worked on yesterday, what they’re working on today, and anything in the way of success the delivery team member calls out the next team member to take the conversation. This will further develop the remote behaviors that compensate for the missing non-verbal communication.

At least once a week, more frequent if warranted, briefly reiterate the sprint goals and minimum viable product (MVP) definition at the start of the scrum-up. I’ve also found it very effective to challenge the team about mid-sprint with an intuitive check on how they are doing with respect to the sprint goals and MVP definition. Any feelings of dread there? Any sense of anxiety? If so, what’s causing that feeling. Move down the 5 Whys path to find any root causes. This will help shake out any hidden dependencies or reluctance by any one team member to ask for help.

Technology

Consider quality virtual meeting hardware and software an essential tool for your business. We wouldn’t accept a surgeon who goes into the operating room with kitchen knives because they’re “good enough.” Sound professional, be professional. Clear and efficient communication is essential to the success of remote agile teams. Have the best possible communication tools available in place and cut corners someplace else.

A good view of the scrum board via web conferencing. This is the big picture the team needs to keep their individual efforts in context of the whole sprint effort.
A high quality and reliable audio connection
- How each team member’s cell reception? Does their connection drop frequently? Is their voice muffled or otherwise hard to hear? They may need a phone upgrade, particularly if their phone cannot leverage WiFi calling.
- Are they on a land-line?
- Are they using a cordless phone that’s subject to interference or cuts in and out?

Photo by Natalie Pedigo on Unsplash

Building Mastery One Day At A Time

Old joke: A young couple visiting New York City for the first time has lost their way. They spot a street musician, just the person to help them get reoriented. “Excuse us, but can you tell us how to get to Carnegie Hall?” The musician stopped playing and thought for a moment before replying: “Practice.”

The prevailing wisdom is that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to achieve the level of mastery in any particular field of endeavor. Turns out, this is true for fields with well-defined measures for excellence like chess and music. In each of these areas, the rules are relatively simple, but mastering them isn’t easy. It’s pretty easy to tell when someone is playing an instrument out of tune or off-beat. And yet, a pawn shop guitar in the hands of Joe Satriani or Liona Boyd will likely result in that instrument expressing a voice no one knew it had. As for chess masters, they’re the ones who win against all challengers regardless the time or place of the match.

For areas of human endeavor where the edges are less well defined, like business or coaching, there may be no marker for how much practice it takes to reach a stable mastery. Having successfully started and built one business does not guarantee the next venture will be equally successful. A coach with a winning system for one team may end up at the bottom of the ranks when the same system is used with a different team.

Developing expertise with scrum is a blend of both of these. The rules are simple, but they are not easy to master. At the same time the territory isn’t well defined and frequently changes. A new client, a new team, or a new project and the edges for what is possible change. Misunderstanding this has been at the root of much of the frustration I’ve observed among people new to agile. They come from a world with well-defined edges – traditional project management practices filled with Gantt charts, milestones, functional specifications, use cases, deployment requirements, and a plethora of other artifacts that “must” be in place before work can begin. As many unknowns as possible must be made known, risks pounded down to trivial annoyances, and all traces of ambiguity squeezed out of the project plan. Learning how to let go of deeply rooted practices like this is no small thing. We like the comfort of well-defined rules. And when there’s work to be done with scarce resources to make it happen, we reach for the rules most familiar to us.

So how can we update the tried-and-true, super comfy confines of past practices and rule sets?

Practice, of the deliberate variety. As Emperor Hadrian might have put it, “Brick by brick, my fellow citizens, brick by brick.”

Research following on the “10,000 hours of practice” generalization has shown that it isn’t just that someone has completed 10,000 hours of practice. The critical factor was how they practiced. Was each hour spent completing the same motions and behaviors from the previous hour or were they spent building on successive experiences, seeking greater challenges, and developing a deeper understanding of their craft? Following the latter path leads to the incremental improvements required to build mastery. And once obtained, the same attitude toward practice helps sustain a level of mastery. There will always be something more to learn, a fresh perspective to experience, or a more satisfying way to experience success.

There is a great deal of neuroscience at the foundation of practice and few would dispute the value of learning how to learn. And yet as our experience grows and we master a particular field, it’s deceptively easy to fall into a complacency of thought whereby we convince ourselves there isn’t anything else to learn. That is until some seismic paradigm shift makes it clear the rules have changed and we’d let our mastery go stale. The consequences of this are captured by Greene (2012) in his book, Mastery:

“We prefer to live with familiar ideas and habits of thinking, but we pay a steep price for this: our minds go dead from the lack of challenge and novelty; we reach a limit in our field and lose control over our fate because we become replaceable.” (pg. 176)

If this happens, learning how to learn may not be enough. Learning how to unlearn may be equally valuable for regaining mastery.

In classic hacker culture, you aren’t a hacker until other recognized hackers call you a hacker. It’s a title to be earned, not claimed. The unfortunate title of “scrum master” aside, it is useful to take this credentialing tradition to heart with scrum as well. Consider yourself an apprentice scrum practitioner until other recognized scrum masters recognize your mastery. Holding such a frame keeps us humble, curious, and open to constant and never ending improvement.

I’ve been practicing, leading, or coaching scrum in one capacity or another for over 10 years and based on my billable hours over the past several years, I’m quite confident I’ve passed the 10,000 hour mark for practicing scrum. Even so, I’m not a master scrum master…yet. The reason is simple and is expressed by the great cellist Pablo Casals’ response to filmmaker Robert Snyder’s query as to why Casals continues to practice five hours a day at 80 years of age, “Because I think I am making progress.” I keep building upon my practice because each day I discover new ways to enhance team performance and improve my skills. Perhaps more telling, any time I think I’ve heard every excuse for not following the scrum framework, someone on one of my teams surprises me.

If you’re interested in staying on the path toward scrum mastery, you need to get out of the books and into the world. There are a variety of ready opportunities to mark and gauge your progress.

Frequently review the framework for scrum and compare what’s there with your current projects. If there are mismatches, find out why. Is there really a good reason for straying from the framework? If so, open a dialog about these differences during your retrospectives.
If possible, ask your fellow agile practitioners when they are holding their next review, backlog refinement, or sprint planning session and get yourself invited as an observer.
There are probably a number of excellent agile related meet-ups in your area. Speaking from personal experience, these are incredibly valuable communities of support and new ideas.

Image by sarfarazis from Pixabay

References

Greene, R. (2012). Mastery. New York, NY: Viking Penguin

The Value of “Good Enough…for Now”

Any company interested in being successful, whether offering a product or service, promises quality to its customers. Those that don’t deliver, die away. Those that do, survive. Those that deliver quality consistently, thrive. Seems like easy math. But then, 1 + 1 = 2 seems like easy math until you struggle through the 350+ pages Whitehead and Russell¹ spent on setting up the proof for this very equation. Add the subjective filters for evaluating “quality” and one is left with a measure that can be a challenge to define in any practical way.

Math aside, when it comes to quality, everyone “knows it when they see it,” usually in counterpoint to a decidedly non-quality experience with a product or service. The nature of quality is indeed chameleonic – durability, materials, style, engineering, timeliness, customer service, utility, aesthetics – the list of measures is nearly endless. Reading customer reviews can reveal a surprising array of criteria used to evaluate the quality for a single product.

The view from within the company, however, is even less clear. Businesses often believe they know quality when they see it. Yet that belief is often predicate on how the organization defines quality, not how their customers define quality. It is a definition that is frequently biased in ways that accentuate what the organization values, not necessarily what the customer values.

Organization leaders may define quality too high, such that their product or service can’t be priced competitively or delivered to the market in a timely manner. If the high quality niche is there, the business might succeed. If not, the business loses out to lower priced competitors that deliver products sooner and satisfy the customer’s criteria for quality (see Figure 1).

Certainly, there is a case that can be made for providing the highest quality possible and developing the business around that niche. For startups and new product development, this may not be be best place to start.

On the other end of the spectrum, businesses that fall short of customer expectations for quality suffer incremental, or in some cases catastrophic, reputation erosion. Repairing or rebuilding a reputation for quality in a competitive market is difficult, maybe even impossible (see Figure 2).

The process for defining quality on the company side of the equation, while difficult, is more or less deliberate. Not so on the customer side. Customers often don’t know what they mean by “quality” until they have an experience that fails to meet their unstated, or even unknown, expectations. Quality savvy companies, therefore, invest in understanding what their customers mean by “quality” and plan accordingly. Less guess work, more effort toward actual understanding.

Furthermore, looking to what the competition is doing may not be the best strategy. They may be guessing as well. It may very well be that the successful quality strategy isn’t down the path of adding more bells and whistles that market research and focus groups suggest customers want. Rather, it may be that improvements in existing features and services are more desirable.

Focus on being clear about whether or not potential customers value the offered solution and how they define value. When following an Agile approach to product development, leveraging minimum viable product definitions can help bring clarity to the effort. With customer-centric benchmarks for quality in hand, companies are better served by first defining quality in terms of “good enough” in the eyes of their customers and then setting the internal goal a little higher. This will maximize internal resources (usually time and money) and deliver a product or service that satisfies the customer’s idea of “quality.”

Case in point: Several months back, I was assembling several bar clamps and needed a set of cutting tools used to put the thread on the end of metal pipes – a somewhat exotic tool for a woodworker’s shop. Shopping around, I could easily drop $300 for a five star “professional” set or $35 for a set that was rated to be somewhat mediocre. I’ve gone high end on many of the tools in my shop, but in this case the $35 set was the best solution for my needs. Most of the negative reviews revolved around issues with durability after repeated use. My need was extremely limited and the “valuable and good enough” threshold was crossed at $35. The tool set performed perfectly and more than paid for itself when compared with the alternatives, whether that be a more expensive tool or my time to find a local shop to thread the pipes for me. This would not have been the case for a pipefitter or someone working in a machine shop.

By understanding where the “good enough and valuable” line is, project and organization leaders are in a better position to evaluate the benefits of incremental improvements to core products and services that don’t break the bank or burn out the people tasked with delivering the goods. Of course, determining what is “good enough” depends on the end goal. Sending a rover to Mars, “good enough” had better be as near to perfection as possible. Threading a dozen pipes for bar clamps used in a wood shop can be completed quite successful with low quality tools that are “good enough” to get the job done.

Addendum

I’ve been giving some more thought to the idea of “good enough” as one of the criteria for defining minimum viable/valuable products. What’s different is that I’ve started to use the phrase “good enough for now.” Reason being, the phrase “good enough” seems to imply an end state. “Good enough” is an outcome. If it is early in a project, people generally have a problem with that. They have some version of an end state that is a significant mismatch with the “good enough” product today. The idea of settling for “good enough” at this point makes it difficult for them to know when to stop work on an interim phase and collect feedback.

“Good enough for now” implies there is more work to be done and the product isn’t in some sort of finished state that they’ll have to settle for. “Good enough for now” is a transitory state in the process. I’m finding that I can more easily gain agreement that a story is finished and get people to move forward to the next “good enough for now” by including the time qualifier.

References

¹Volume 1 of Principia Mathematica by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell (Cambridge University Press, page 379). The proof was actually not completed until Volume 2. (This article cross-posted at LinkedIn.)

Agile Haiku #2

The rules are in place.
We’ve always done it this way.
Sound of waterfall.

The Perfect System in an Imperfect World

With apologies to Winston Churchill,

Many forms of project management have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that Scrum is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that Scrum is the worst form of project management except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

Agile in general, and scrum in particular, has suffered their share of hard yet deserved knocks. But many of these complaints come from people who are expecting perfection, some panacea or magic remedy to what ails their project management world. Often they want this perfection out of the box and miss the hard work needed to implement a relatively simple set of rules and guidelines while shifting from the “old ways” of getting work done.

Consider a flock of geese.

Over the course of hundreds of thousands of years they have worked out an efficient way to migrate. Not perfect, but well adapted to the world in which they live. At the heart of this behavior are several important principles: Shared responsibility, clear communication, and coordinated effort.

Consider Agile similarly. It is a perfect system for an imperfect world. The principles found in the formation of a flock of geese can be found within the Agile Manifesto. Its foundation of assuming the need for experimentation, learning, and adaptation is central to it’s enduring success. If these values are absent from or poorly represented in an organization’s culture, the chances for sustainable success using any methodology are diminished.

Photo by Josh Massey on Unsplash

Concave, Convex, and Nonlinear Fragility

Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book, “Antifragile,” is a wealth of information. I’ve returned to it often since first reading it several years ago. My latest revisit has been to better understand his ideas about representing the nonlinear and asymmetric aspects of fragile/antifragile in terms of “concave” and “convex.” My first read of this left me a bit confused, but I got the gist of it and moved on. Taleb is a very smart guy so I need to understand this.

The first thing I needed to sort out on this revisit was Taleb’s use of language. The fragile/antifragile comparison is variously described in his book as:

Concave/Convex
Slumped solicitor/Humped solicitor
Curves inward/Curves outward
Frown/Smile
Negative convexity effects/Positive convexity effects
Pain more than gain/Gain more than pain
Doesn’t “like” volatility (presumable)/”Likes” volatility

Tracking his descriptions is made a little more challenging by reversals in reference when writing of both together (concave and convex then convex and concave) and mis-matches between the text and illustrations. For example:

Nonlinearity comes in two kinds: concave (curves inward), as in the case of the king and the stone, or its opposite, convex (curves outward). And of course, mixed, with concave and convex sections. (note the order: concave / convex) Figures 10 and 11 show the following simplifications of nonlinearity: the convex and the concave resemble a smile and a frown, respectively. (note the order: convex / concave)

Figure 10 shows:

So, “convex, curves outward” is illustrated as an upward curve and “concave, curves inward” is illustrated as a downward curve. Outward is upward and inward is downward. It reads like a yoga pose instruction or a play-by-play call for a game of a Twister.

After this presentation, Taleb simplifies the ideas:

I use the term “convexity effect” for both, in order to simplify the vocabulary, saying “positive convexity effects” and “negative convexity effects.”

This was helpful. The big gain is when Taleb gets to the math and graphs what he’s talking about. Maybe the presentation to this point is helpful to non-math thinkers, but for me it was more obfuscating than illuminating. My adaptation of the graphs presented by Taleb:

With this picture, it’s easier for me to understand the non-linear relationship between a variable’s volatility and fragility vs antifragility. The rest of the chapter is easier to understand with this picture of the relationships in mind.

Parkinson’s Law of Perfection

C. Northcote Parkinson is best known for, not surprisingly, Parkinson’s Law:

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

But there are many more gems in “Parkinson’s Law and Other Studies in Administration.” The value of re-reading classics is that what was missed on a prior read becomes apparent given the accumulation of a little more experience and the current context. On a re-read this past week, I discovered this:

It is now known that a perfection of planned layout is achieved only by institutions on the point of collapse. This apparently paradoxical conclusion is based upon a wealth of archaeological and historical research, with the more esoteric details of which we need not concern ourselves. In general principle, however, the method pursued has been to select and date the buildings which appear to have been perfectly designed for their purpose. A study and comparison of these has tended to prove that perfection of planning is a symptom of decay. During a period of exciting discovery or progress there is no time to plan the perfect headquarters. The time for that comes later, when all the important work has been done. Perfection, we know, is finality; and finality is death.

Several years back my focus for the better part of a year was on mapping out software design processes for a group of largely non-technical instructional designers. If managing software developers is akin to herding cats, finding a way to shepherd non-technical creative types such as instructional designers (particularly old school designers) can be likened to herding a flock of canaries – all over the place in three dimensions.

What made this effort successful was framing the design process as a set of guidelines that were easy to track and monitor. The design standards and common practices, for example, consisted of five bullet points. Building just enough fence to keep everyone in the same area while limiting free range behaviors to specific places was important. These were far from perfect, but they allowed for the dynamic vitality suggested by Parkinson. If the design standards and common practices document ever grew past something that could fit on one page, it would suggest the company was moving toward over specialization and providing services to a narrow slice of the potential client pie. In the rapidly changing world of adult education, this level of perfection would most certainly suggest decay and risk collapse as client needs change.

Image by EWAR from Pixabay

That Isn’t What I Expected

Adverse surprises during a team driven project are about as welcome as whooping cough at a glassblowers convention. Minimizing the opportunity for surprises comes down to how well expectations are defined at the very beginning and how well they are managed during the course of the project. Unidentified expectations are like landmines in the project path. When they explode, it’s bad and the course of the project WILL change. Product owners can’t elucidate all the expectations a stakeholder may have, but with experience they can define the major ones. With practice and attention, experienced product owners can tease out all but the minor expectations that are often dependant on discovery within the project’s sprints.

Key to this skill is knowing the questions to ask at the beginning. In my experience, stakeholders rarely deliberately hold back their expectations. They just don’t know what they don’t know and it is the product owner’s responsibility to establish clarity around expectations. Intuitively obvious expectations rarely play out as such.

A few questions for stakeholders that I’ve found helpful:

What business problems do you intend to solve with this project?
What do you need to see to know the project is progressing?
What will you see when the project is done?
What is your availability commitment for the duration of the project?
How often to you expect to meet to review progress?
How long do YOU think it will take to complete the project?
To what extent are your functional groups integrated?
Describe your process from design to development to implementation?
Are there other stakeholders we need to know about and include?
What factors have helped and hurt success with past projects?

This is by no means an exhaustive list of questions. And they may even seem obvious. The answers, however, are almost never obvious.

I also find it effective to challenge stakeholders with scenarios.

What happens if we discover this project will take two months longer than expected?
What happens if we discover a desired solution is technically unfeasible?
How will you support us if we encounter significant delays from client deliverables?

Product owners need to keep pursuing clarity around expectations until they are satisfied they have a good understanding of how the people side of the project will unfold. This will go a long way to helping the development team handle the technical side of the project.

While stakeholders answer these questions, product owners need to pay attention not just the words stakeholders use, but how they answer as well. They need to be scanning for underlying assumptions that drive the answers. These often reflect relevant cultural drivers which can signal significant expectations seemingly unrelated to the project at hand.

For example, perhaps the product owner has established the expectation of a three business day turnaround for feedback from the stakeholder when asked to review periodic project deliverables. “We can complete our reviews within three business days and work to get them to you as fast as possible,” says the stakeholder somewhat hesitantly as he looks off into the distance. Where the pain begins is when the inattentive product owner discovers that, while the feedback may be ready, the client organization has a thick layer of compliance and the feedback is hung up in legal for an additional one to two weeks…every time. If the stakeholder’s responses reflect something less than 100% commitment, keep asking questions designed to surface underlying assumptions.

As each sprint concludes, and eventually the project as well, the savvy product owner knows their work with expectations isn’t complete. Retrospectives for each sprint, each release, and the project conclusion should make note of the expectations that were missed and consider questions that could have been asked that would have helped surface the surprise expectations sooner.

This is also an excellent time to consider if any of the existing expectations have changed or if it appears there may be new expectations emerging. Internal forces, such as changes in team composition, and external forces, such as shifting market demands, can significantly impact the set of expectations a product owner is tasked with managing.

If you expected to read these kinds of things about surfacing stakeholder expectations, then you’re probably an experienced product owner.

Image by S K from Pixabay

Best Practices or Common Practices

I’m using the phrase “best practices” less and less when working to establish good agile practices. In fact, I’ve stopped using it at all. The primary reason is that it implies there is a set of practices that apply to all circumstances. And in the case of “industry best practices,” they are externally established criteria – they are the best practices and all others have been fully vetted and found wanting. I have found that to be untrue. I’ve also found that people have a hard time letting go of things that are classified as “best.” When your practices are the “best,” there’s little incentive to change even when the evidence strongly suggests there are better alternatives. Moreover, peer pressure works against the introduction of innovative practices. Deviating from a “best” practice risks harsh judgment, retribution, and the dreaded “unprofessional” label.

If an organization is exploring a new area of business or bringing in-house a set of expertise that was previously outsourced, adopting “best” practices may be the smart way to go until some measure of stability has been established. But to keep the initial set of practices and change only as the external definition of “best” changes ends up dis-empowering the organization’s employees. It sends the message, “You aren’t smart enough to figure this out and improve on your own.” When denied the opportunity to excel and improve, employees that need that quality in their work will move on. Over time, the organization is left with just the sort of people who indeed are not inclined to improve – the type of individuals who need well defined job responsibilities and actively resist change of any sort. The friction builds until change and adaptation grind along at glacial speeds or stop altogether.

The inertia endemic to “best” practices often goes unnoticed. When one group reaches a level of success by implementing a particular practice, it is touted as one of the keys to its success. And so other groups or organizations adopt the practice. Since everyone wants success, these practices are faithfully implemented according to tradition and change little even as the world around them changes dramatically. Classic cargo cult thinking.

In his Harvard Business Review article “Which Best Practice Is Ruining Your Business?”, Freek Vermeulen observes that “when managers don’t see [a] practice as the root cause of their eroding competitive position, the practice persists — and may even spread further to other organizations in the same line of business.” Consequently, business leaders “never connect the problems of today with [a] practice launched years ago.” Common practices, on the other hand, suggest there is room for improvement. They are common because a collection of people have accepted them as generally valuable, not because they are presumed universally true or anointed as “best.” They are derived internally, not imposed externally. As a result, letting go of a “common” practice for a better practice is easier and carries less stigma. With enough adoption throughout the organization, the better practice often becomes the common practice. When we use practices that build upon the collected wisdom from an organization’s experiences we are more likely to take ownership of the process and adapt in ways that naturally lead to improvement.

There are long term benefits to framing prevailing practices as “common.” It reverses the “you are not smart enough” message and encourages practitioners to take more control and ownership in the quality of their practices. Cal Newport argues that “[g]iving people more control over what they do and how they do it increases their happiness, engagement, and sense of fulfillment.” This message is at the heart of Dan Pink’s book, “Drive,” in which he makes the case that more control leads to better grades, better sports performance, better productivity, and more happiness. Pink cites research from Cornell that followed over three hundred small businesses. Half of the businesses deliberately gave substantial control and autonomy to their employees. Over time, these businesses grew at four times the rate of their counterparts.

When you are considering the adoption or pursuit of any best practice, ask yourself, “best” according to whom? It may help avoid some unintended consequences down the line where someone else’s “best” practice yields the worst results for you, your team, or your organization.

Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay

References

Newport, C. (2012). So Good They Can’t Ignore You. New York, NY: Grand Central Publishing.

Pink, D.H. (2009). Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. New York, NY: Riverhead

Vermeulen, F. (2012). Which Best Practice Is Ruining Your Business? Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2012/12/which-best-practice-is-ruining