Solving problems

Are you tired of building, testing, and deploying new features that don't seem to make a difference to your customers or your business? It's a frustrating feeling, isn't it? Unfortunately, it's all too common in today's fast-paced tech world. Many companies have become so focused on churning out new features that they've lost sight of what really matters - delivering value to their customers.

Believe it or not, research suggests that only a small percentage of the features and projects on your product roadmap actually generate a positive return on investment. That's right - despite all the time and effort you put into building and launching new capabilities, most of them are unlikely to have a significant impact on your bottom line.

If you're feeling disillusioned with the current state of things, don't despair. There is a solution - and it starts with changing the way you approach problem-solving. By taking a step back and re-evaluating your strategies for building, testing, and deploying new features, you can start to focus on the capabilities that truly matter to your customers and your business. So why not take the leap and see what a difference it could make?

The real problem lies in the fact that these feature teams are designed to cater to the needs of stakeholders in your organisation, rather than focusing on what truly benefits your customers and aligns with your business goals.

Your business leaders and stakeholders are each aware of their own specific requirements, and they create a list of features and projects that they believe will enable them to fulfil their obligations to the company. These priorities are then passed down to the feature teams, who are expected to develop a product roadmap complete with deadlines and deliverables.

Have you ever wondered why so many of the features on your product roadmap fail to deliver the expected results?

The truth is, each of these features is intended to address an underlying problem, whether it be a customer issue or a company-related challenge. In the feature team model, the feature is conceptualised by the team's designer and built by its engineers. However, the success of the feature ultimately rests on the shoulders of whoever requested it in the first place.

This is precisely why it's unfair to hold the feature team accountable for business outcomes. Their job is to produce output, i.e., the features. If a feature doesn't achieve the desired results, the team will simply claim that it was not their responsibility.

Of course, the stakeholder who requested the feature is unlikely to want to shoulder the blame for its failure either. They may complain that the feature did not turn out as they had hoped or that it took longer to deliver than expected. This lack of trust between stakeholders and feature teams is a common issue that plagues many companies.

One of the grave consequences of working in this manner is the abundance of "orphaned" features. These features fail to produce any real value and are left waiting for another iteration that rarely ever happens. This leads to a rapid accumulation of technical debt that can quickly spiral out of control, causing significant slowdowns for feature teams and even bringing the business to its knees.

Unfortunately, as soon as a company loses its ability to consistently create value and innovate on behalf of its customers, it is only a matter of time before competitors offer more compelling solutions to those customers. This is a fate that has befallen countless companies.

While it may be possible to reduce prices or run clever marketing and sales promotions, these measures at best will only delay the inevitable. Sooner or later, another company will step in and serve your customers in ways that you are no longer able to.

Solve problems for your customers and your business

Instead of providing the product team with a prescriptive roadmap of features and projects, they are presented with a set of problems to tackle and desired outcomes to achieve. An empowered product team is not solely responsible for implementing stakeholder's desired features, but for creating a solution that is suitable for both the customer and the business.

This entails developing a solution that meets four critical criteria: value for the customer, usability for the user, feasibility for the engineers to develop using the available time, skills, and technology, and viability for the business, accounting for limitations in marketing, sales, finance, service, legal, and compliance.

In an empowered product team, engineers are not merely tasked with building but also with identifying the most appropriate solution, making them what is referred to as empowered engineers.

Their advantage lies in working with the enabling technology on a daily basis, enabling them to recognise what is currently achievable. When empowered engineers interact directly with users and customers, you can observe that almost every innovative product or service originates from these interactions.

As famously stated by Steve Jobs:

"We don't hire all these engineers to tell them what to build; we hire them to show us what's possible."

When combined with a skilled product designer who specialises in designing effective and engaging user experiences, and a capable product manager who comprehends both customers and the business's limitations, you will possess a cross-functional skill set required to solve challenging issues in a manner that our customers appreciate, yet works for our business.

An empowered product team is held accountable for outcomes, not just shipping features, and time to market is still relevant but secondary to time to money, which means the time required to achieve the required outcome.

If a feature is released by an empowered product team without achieving the necessary impact, the team iterates on that feature or approach until it does.

The team's goal is to quickly determine if a particular product idea or approach will be successful, which is known as product discovery. The product team has a range of tools and techniques at its disposal to test ideas and approaches quickly, rather than building several ideas and essentially using customers as guinea pigs.

Prototypes, which come in various forms and are fast and inexpensive to create, are mostly created by the product team. Each prototype is designed to test different risks or assumptions.

When it comes to testing product ideas, there's a golden rule that every empowered product team swears by: keep it fast and keep it cheap. The idea is simple – if a concept can be tested quickly and inexpensively, it's a win-win for everyone.

And that's where prototypes come in. These nifty little experiments come in all shapes and sizes, but they all have one thing in common – they're lightning fast and won't break the bank. In fact, they're usually two orders of magnitude less expensive than the final product.

Now, if you're relying on a traditional feature team to develop and iterate on a product, you might be in for a long wait. It can take up to 1-2 years and several iterations before a feature is generating the results you need, assuming you can convince stakeholders to stay the course.

But with an empowered product team, things move much faster. They're trained to tackle problems head-on and equipped with the skills to experiment with new ideas. And thanks to their speedy approach to product discovery, they can achieve the same results in just 1-2 weeks. That means the final product version will be in the hands of your customers generating the results you need within just a few short weeks.

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