PITA 069

Written By randy silver

Can Product live without delivery people? What do they need to succeed?

  • You can… but only if the team has the capability and personality to do it themselves already.

  • Organisational depth and maturity is a critical factor here - it’s easier to get away without it in a small org, in general. In a larger org, it can work when you have junior product people who then either function as PROJECT, do both poorly, or work too hard and burn out.

  • It comes down to personalities. If the team is negotiating RACI, it’s not going to work - they need to have a shared sense of responsibility to make sure that things are going well, not be overly territorial. But having someone with a delivery bias on the team is a good thing.

The handoff between product & engineering - how do we get better at that?

    • Most senior product person doesn’t come from a product background - Scope and negotiation goes back & forth

    • We have trouble defining an MVP. We build hardware & sell software. Defining when a user gets value is hard to get to - we get handed a full waterfall implementation, with a desire to build the whole thing.

    • User Story mapping is great for this - finding the smallest thing - Jeff Patton has a lot on this. What’s the smallest slice of the user journey we could make and test?

    • Tie this in with Riskiest Assumption Tests - what’s the thing that could derail the monolith? Can we prove if we can make it work in the next few weeks? Better to learn this early and at pace, rather than in 6 months. You can always adjust plans along the way.

    • Shape Up, Jobs to be Done concepts are useful here. Start with Personas, expand from there

    • Speak in English - use the language that they use, rather than the concepts from Product and Engineering.

randy silver
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PITA 068