Change

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As our business grows, so does our business group growing pains.  We are finding it harder and harder to support all the people vying for our attention.  Our structure worked great for a long time.  Now it is time to change.   

Our product offering has the same challenges.  Originally, we were able to gain large adoption and market share based on solving a core market need.  But, by getting large adoption, we've shifted the market need.  Now the customer needs more.  We need to change the product structure to meet this need and to grow the product to the next level.  

Is there a central theme we can rally around?  I believe that central theme is "Delighting our Customers".  If that is the forefront of our conversations, then both product and structure will follow. 

Momentum Management

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Our team is in the midst of releasing a new product.  We are releasing it initially to a minor (read small) customer set.  We are doing this to keep it simple and quick.  However, it turns out that it took much longer than expected.  Why?  

Our team is in the midst of releasing a new product.  We are releasing it initially to a minor (read small) customer set.  We are doing this to keep it simple and quick.  However, it turns out that it took much longer than expected.  Why?  

In this case it comes down to momentum.  We've done much larger product releases, in shorter time.  By setting out initially saying that this would be a minor customer release it made it easy for us to fill in other things and share the focus.  Momentum was killed.  

This problem was exacerbated because it required a third party vendor to help us with something.  By us not keeping momentum internally, we couldn't keep on top of the third party to do their work.  In the end, this project slipped by 5-6 weeks.  Effectively almost doubling the time it should have taken.
 
We recognized that lost of momentum about 1 week ago.  With some hard work to get things back on track, the vendor is now done with their work, and we are set to launch the product to market soon.  
So, how do you keep the momentum?  
  1. Keeping the sprints short and keeping the non-development teams in short cycles of milestones.  
  2. Try to clear off other competing mind-share on the non-development teams (marketing, services, sales, etc..) for a very short period of time, and sprint on getting this one project done. 
  3. Keep the chatter high and communication high.  Do your "milk runs" with all the stakeholders.  Walk around and talk to the people.  
  4. If you keep hearing the same thing that are a blockers time and time again, that should be a read flag.  You have lost momentum.  
Small projects are the ones that are at the highest risk here.  Once you recognize the loss in momentum, it is the Product Managers job to refocus the teams, get the communication up and reset milestones in a shorter cycle.  Get that momentum back.   

Letting Engineering Manage the Backlog

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The Product Managers that work for me are hyper focused on delivering quality for our customers continuously.  They are constantly finding the simple solutions for our current biggest problem and executing with agility.  However, I've noticed that this leaves only a little room for Engineers to innovate on customer facing problems.  Engineering uses their extra time working on "technical debt".   

I've often wondered about innovating in something like Google 20% time and the way that Facebook gives their engineers more control.  Could we slice off some time for the engineers to work on the parts of our business that they see as a priority.  

Potential issues will be making sure the business feels like they are getting valuable product and time boxing the effort.  

I like the idea of giving all the engineers 2 weeks of time to work on this.  And by giving them extensive prep time with direct meetings with customers.  I'm also thinking that we potentially need a quick review of each engineers idea before we start they are building something that is in the right ballpark.  

Soon I'm going to see how the rest of our organization reacts to this idea.  I'll update the blog with what we end up doing.  

If anyone has any experience with setting up something like this, I'd love to hear your experience.