In today's fast-paced and competitive business landscape, it is crucial for companies to have effective product teams that can deliver high-impact solutions. However, many product teams often struggle to achieve this goal due to various challenges and constraints. In this blog post, we will explore the importance of lean product development from the perspective of engineering and how it can enable effective product teams. We will also discuss the role of system architecture in facilitating product delivery&discovery and highlight some common pitfalls that hinder the success of product teams.
The Risks of Product Development
Before diving into the details, let's first understand the risks associated with product development. According to a blog post by Marty Cagan, there are four major risks: value, usability, feasibility, and business viability.
- Value: Will customers buy or use our software? This risk pertains to whether the customer sees value in the product and is willing to adopt it.
- Usability: Can users figure out how to use the software? This risk focuses on the user experience and whether the software is intuitive and easy to use.
- Feasibility: Can our engineers build the software within the given constraints? This risk considers the technical feasibility of implementing the desired features.
- Business Viability: Does the solution align with the overall business strategy and goals? This risk examines whether the solution is viable from a business perspective.
It is important to address these risks to ensure the success of a product. However, many product teams often overlook or underestimate these risks, leading to failures and wasted resources.
Learning from Industry Leaders
To emphasize the significance of lean product development, let's take a look at some insights from industry leaders. Microsoft conducted research on their own product development process and found that only one-third of their ideas actually improved metrics. Similarly, Amazon's success rate was below half of their ideas. These findings highlight the importance of validating ideas and the need to filter out ineffective ones.
It is crucial to recognize that even highly successful companies like Microsoft and Amazon face challenges in generating impactful ideas. Therefore, assuming that all ideas are great without proper validation can be detrimental to a product team's success.
Not only are many of the ideas not positive, but also the ones that are, require several iterations (with real feedback) to begin generating positive impact.
The Vicious Cycle of Software Development
To understand why lean product development is essential, we need to examine the vicious cycle of software development. In this cycle, a product team has a fixed capacity to develop software. While some features may generate positive impact, others may go unused or fail to meet user expectations. Additionally, the software incurs maintenance costs, such as debugging, monitoring, and infrastructure support (See: Basal Cost of Software).
Over time, the accumulation of software and its associated maintenance costs can deplete the team's capacity for innovation. This cycle hinders the team's ability to focus on high-impact initiatives and leads to a decrease in overall productivity.
Furthermore, the cost of maintaining software is not linear with its size. Doubling the size of an application does not double the maintenance cost; it increases it even more. This exponential increase in maintenance costs further limits the team's capacity for innovation.
Viewing Software as a Means to an End
To break free from the vicious cycle of software development, it is crucial to view software as a means to an end rather than the end itself. Software should be seen as a liability and an expensive asset that should be minimized. The focus should be on maximizing outcomes, impact, and return on investment while minimizing functionality, requirements, and maintenance costs.
By adopting this mindset, product teams can prioritize high-impact initiatives and avoid wasting resources on unnecessary features. This shift in perspective enables teams to make better decisions and deliver more value to customers.
This way of thinking also helps protect against the Feature creep that many products suffer from.
Effective Product Teams and Lean Product Development
To achieve high performance, product teams need to embrace effective lean product practices. These practices involve building the right thing and making the thing right.
Building the right thing involves minimizing the amount of software while maximizing the impact. It requires filtering out unnecessary ideas and focusing on initiatives that align with the overall business strategy. This approach ensures that the team's efforts are directed towards high-impact solutions.
Making the thing right involves continuous learning, hypothesis experiments, and user stories. It requires a collaborative team effort, with everyone involved in the product discovery&delivery process. By working together, teams can validate assumptions, reduce risks, and deliver elegant and impactful solutions.
This process of continuous learning, filtering ideas, continuously experimenting, and delivering in small, safe steps that allow us to learn (through feedback), minimizing waste as much as possible, is what we would call Lean Product Development.
The Role of System Architecture
System architecture plays a crucial role in facilitating lean product delivery. It should be designed to optimize learning, experimentation, and evolution. Here are some key considerations for system architecture:
- Decoupling Release and Deployment: To enable business-driven decisions, release should be decoupled from deployment. Feature flags can be used to control the release of new features and enable experimentation. This ability to release to a group of users independently enables the team to progressively validate hypotheses with different customer groups, thus managing the risk assumed in each case.
- Product Instrumentation: The system should be instrumented to gather relevant metrics and operational data. This data provides valuable insights into user behavior and helps in making informed decisions. Assuming that a team can be autonomous and make good decisions when flying blind and without instruments makes no sense. Product-level instrumentation and observability are not a luxury, but an essential part of any effective product team.
- Operational Data Exploration: It is essential to have systems in place to explore operational data effectively. This ensures that the collected data is utilized to its full potential and helps in identifying patterns and trends. This point complements the previous one; having good instrumentation is useless if it is not easy to exploit for making product decisions or learning about our users' behavior.
- Safe-to-Learn Environment: The system should provide a safe environment for experimentation and learning. A blameless culture should be fostered, where failures are seen as opportunities for improvement rather than as a cause for blame.
- Modular/Decoupled Architecture: A modular architecture enables multiple product teams to work autonomously on different parts of the system. It reduces the blast radius of failures and allows for more efficient development and maintenance. This architecture should also allow the team to easily compose new applications, proof of concepts, and demos based on the available modules and components. When the design quality is good, it is much easier to reuse components for experiments and as a basis for new use cases.
By incorporating these architectural considerations, product teams can create an environment that enables continuous evolution, learning, and experimentation. Ultimately, it all comes down to having an adaptable system that we can trust and that is optimized for making small, low-risk changes at high speed.
Depending on the type of system, we can even include architecture decisions that specifically help us experiment and learn more quickly. For example, if it is a product that can be considered a platform, having all capabilities and use cases accessible through APIs can allow us to experiment and create prototypes very quickly using those endpoints from Low Code or No Code systems.
Overcoming Challenges and Maximizing Outcomes
To build effective product teams, it is essential to address common challenges and pitfalls. Here are some key points to consider:
- Autonomy and Decision-Making: Product teams should have the autonomy to make decisions and generate ideas. Stakeholders should trust the expertise of engineers and involve them in the product discovery process.
- Technical Debt and Stability: Addressing technical debt and ensuring system stability are crucial for successful product delivery. Without a stable foundation, teams will struggle to innovate and deliver high-impact solutions.
- Focus on Outcomes: Engineers should shift their focus from technology to outcomes. The value and impact delivered to customers should be the primary concern, rather than the features or technology used.
- Continuous Learning and Improvement: Product teams should embrace a culture of continuous learning and improvement. This involves validating assumptions, running experiments, and constantly seeking feedback from customers and the system.
- Collaboration and Ownership: Effective product teams require collaboration and shared ownership. Product managers, designers, and engineers should work together as a cohesive unit, leveraging their respective expertise to deliver high-impact solutions.
- Praise Continuous Impact and Learning: To generate the appropriate dynamics within the team, we must celebrate the impacts we achieve (changes in user behavior, metric improvements, cost reductions, etc.) and not so much the functionalities we make available (which would only be the means). It is also essential that we celebrate the learnings since they allow us to make better decisions and increase future impact.
Conclusion
In conclusion, lean product development is a critical component of effective product teams. By prioritizing product discovery&delivery and incorporating it into system architecture and practices, teams can maximize outcomes, minimize waste, and deliver high-impact solutions. It is essential for engineers to embrace a product mindset and actively participate in all aspect of the product development process (discovery, delivery). By doing so, they can contribute to innovation and drive the success of their product teams.
If you want to learn more about product discovery&delivery and effective product teams, I recommend reading the following books:
Or if you prefer talks, I recommend these ones:
Remember, product development and continuous delivery go hand in hand. To achieve success, product teams must embrace both and strive for continuous learning and improvement.
References and related content
