2 key tips for managing scope creep effectively

When it comes to why products fail, you might think of the big reasons:

• No funding?
• No market need
• Bad execution

But a lot of the time, I’ve seen one silent product killer.

Scope creep.?

You can easily delay your time to market by 3 months without even noticing it.

Because scope creep happens in chunks, not all at once.?

1 new feature here, 1 new feature there.

Next thing you know, you’re in a disaster.?

The worst part is — most teams know about scope creep.

They still let it happen though.

But why does it actually happen??

In my experience, there are 2 main culprits.

Problem #1: Gold plating

?This is what happens:

You want to keep adding features to your product to add value to users.

So you’re adding and adding and adding.

The end is nowhere in sight.

And here I need to take off one pretty bad band-aid.

You as a founder are usually the main “culprit”.

That’s because you want to stay in the comfort zone of building your product.

You don’t want to face the reality of the market.?

But that’s what will actually make your product great.

What you can do to solve this:

Try to look at the bigger picture.

Go from the product side to the business side.?

Try to understand your users, talk to them, do surveys, etc.

Because it’s their opinion that matters.?

Reaching the feedback loop, and making incremental changes to your product based on it is what will make the most difference.

Another tip would be that you shouldn’t let any investors influence your product vision.

They don’t know the product as well as you do.

Remember, you’re not creating your product for the investor. You’re creating it for the user.

Now let’s talk about the second problem that leads to scope creep.

Problem #2: Unclear objectives & requirements?

Whether it’s a business analyst, product manager, or you as a founder writing your requirements, if they’re not detailed you’re going to have problems.

Good thing there’s an easy solution for this.

What you can do to solve it:

All of your product requirement documents should have:

• Detailed objectives/goals
• User stories
• Features
• Constraints and dependencies

Go into detail on each of these points as much as you can.

That way you’re much less likely to go over your scope.

On that note, here’s a good article on how to write a software requirement document.

That’s it for this month's newsletter!

Talk to you soon,

Marko