How To Make Developers Happier and Deliver Products Faster?

Today's issue is delivered by Mateusz Krawczyński, Delivery Director at Netguru.

When building an innovative product, you can never be 100% sure you're focusing on the right things. The best you can do is hedge your bets.

By choosing a mix of low-risk, low-reward, and high-risk, high-reward bets, you can optimize your overall chances of success. This is why we rely on the digital acceleration approach.

It's not just about finding the fastest way to build software; digital acceleration is about moving from uncertainty to certainty as quickly as possible. By doing so, you can avoid distractions, processes replete with loopholes, slow decision-making, and strong dependencies between individual elements of complex systems.

Here are four ways you can accelerate your product development:

1. Dual-track agile – Instead of a linear process of discovery followed by development, run development and discovery in parallel. New ideas are tested while features are being built, and discovery insights inform development and vice-versa.

2. Customer-biased prioritization – Stakeholder opinions shouldn’t be the only basis for setting project priorities, as they often divert the team from focusing on the end user. The primary focus should be on customer needs.

3. Fast experimentation with low-code/no-code – To reach product-market fit quickly, test and learn from failures rapidly. Experiment a lot, but cut failed experiments immediately without sunk cost bias. Low-code/no-code tools are perfect for this, allowing even non-technical workers to create prototypes. AI tools will make this even easier, enabling everyone to build software using just text prompts.

4. De-risking – Proactively limit the risk of your bets by adopting a scientific mindset. Prioritize user and market research, and commit to always collecting data and making informed decisions, not guesses.

And here are a couple of methods to improve your development process:

1. Lean experimentation – Lean experimentation saves you from decision paralysis. Not sure what to do? Create a hypothesis, design an experiment, collect data, and validate. One of the biggest mistakes people make here is a lack of commitment. If an experiment fails, you cut it ruthlessly.

2. Outcome-driven innovation – ODI is based on the Jobs-to-be-Done framework, used to understand the exact outcome your customers need to achieve and how your product can help drive that outcome. Instead of starting with a product idea and trying to fit it to the market, you get a deep understanding of customers first, and then build what they need.

In their rush to reach the market, many executives might want to skip over the problem definition stage. The most important stage of this method!

3. North Star metric – Your North Star metric is the guiding light for your business. The biggest value it provides is that it can end an extended discussion quickly, because if something doesn’t contribute to your North Star, then it’s not a priority, and you can ignore it for now.

On the other hand, if you choose the wrong metric it will become a siren’s call instead of a guiding light.

4. Empowered product teams – It’s easy to lose sight of what’s best for the product, especially when everybody is focused on realizing a vision without validating it or analyzing alternatives. An empowered product team is encouraged to challenge management’s decisions and assumptions, and to fight for the good of the product and its users.

5. Design Sprints – The Design Sprint is a specific series of steps that you take in five days to build and test a prototype. This process was created and perfected at Google, and it’s the type of thing where you should really stick to the recommended steps and trust the process.

It can generate a lot of value, but it comes at a cost because a whole team is going to be focusing on this and nothing else for five days.

In general, making changes to your process will require effort from key stakeholders, developers, designers, researchers, and all other teams.

It won’t be easy, but it’s unavoidable.

If you’re interested in learning more, feel free to reach out to us!

Best,

Mateusz