No one sets out to fail to deliver a new tech service. Nowadays everyone says the same things and makes the same noises. Beleaguered old hands from big business and public sector who’ve been through it many times will breathlessly and urgently pronounce the following:
- Make sure you know what your core proposition is, focus ruthlessly
- Don’t gold plate the product or the technology too early, YAGNI, KISS, TEFAL
- Deliver early: get a barely breathing MVP out the door and iterate like crazy based on feedback
- Use automated tests to give confidence to release little and often
I made up TEFAL, sorry :)
So it’s easy then? Just Do It. But here’s were it starts to flounder — a cycle which is so difficult to break out of it should really have a name ! let me explain.
- You have taken all of the advice above, set a launch date for your MVP. Its a barely walking skeleton and the product team have a full backlog of must have features they really want, the tech teams hate the code they hastily hacked together and want to structure it in a more scalable & supportable way.
- An MVP, while great in theory (and we’ve all swallowed The Lean Startup and want to implement!) the reality is that there IS a point when it really becomes viable and marketable and if you’re NOT in a startup, that go/no-go decision involves a lot of well meaning interested parties.
- You’ve all agreed to squeeze it out the door but something comes up that delays it for a month. Now this is a real problem, as there are expensive engineering teams twiddling thumbs ready to react to go-live learnings. So you agree that you now have time to do feature X and code refactor Y.
- The next go-live date comes around, the first issue is now resolved but feature X is only 90% done, and refactor Y hasn’t really worked out, so we need time to roll it back. So you wait two weeks for that, but now feature X isn’t working quite as planned — you’ve spent ￡￡￡ of a team’s time on it, it has to work!
- You delay go live for another month to get it right. But now the release to live is so big that it needs to be right — customers will soon be expecting it as we have delayed for three months, so you decide you may as well add in that one more ‘crucial’ piece of functionality or tech. ??
So what do you do about it? It requires more than theory, limited experience and learned catchphrases.
In large complex organisations there are moving wheels within wheels, misaligned motivations and occasionally a chaotic combination of people and technology. It’s never easy but at heart the way forward is to be brave, compassionate, realistic and push very hard to get that anaemic, but truly viable first version out the door.
