Two Ways to Increase Impact In Software Product Development (part 2)

I go deeper into the two ideas I shared in an earlier post and the critical components of using each idea in software product development.

Photo by Susan Wilkinson on Unsplash

This post is a follow-up to:

In this follow-up post, I provide more details of two important ideas to establish a context-specific enough for all parts of an organisation to align and contribute to creating a positive impact.

Plan with a clear & aligned view of the outcomes your organisation seeks to achieve at the centre of everything you do

This sounds like an incredibly obvious concept—so obvious that everyone must be doing it. But I would like to ask you to interrogate what is happening in your organisation and see if you can honestly say this is being achieved.

Specifically, I mean, are you communicating clearly;

1. The longer-term outcome desired 
   Have a statement you and your collaborators can agree on, free of weasel words and describe an outcome that improves the reality for your target audience.
   
   This might be a vision document, a result defined in PuMP, or an OKR defined for a longer timeframe, such as 3–5 years. It can be shorter or longer, as long as it’s realistic to achieve in the timeframe. When we have clarity and are aligned on what we seek to achieve, we can achieve outstanding results!
   

2. The shorter-term outcomes that support this goal. This could be a ‘result’, as defined in PuMP, an outcome-oriented OKR, or any other form of expressing a specific goal that the probability that any given two collaborators understand is similar enough to pull together in the same direction, most of the time.
   

3. The relationship between each goal and the long-term desired outcome

   This might be expressed with a Result Map as defined in PuMP, a map of the relationships between outcome-oriented OKRs, an opportunity tree, a pre-requisite tree (as defined in Theory of Constraints) or any other goal relationship approach.
   
   I am not sure there is any single method for doing this well; I only know what worked well for the teams I worked with . We used the Result Map notation that Stacey Barr developed for PuMP and documented our outcome-oriented objectives (and potential objectives) in this format. This included some long-term objectives that described the long-term success of our business.
   
   The key is to interrogate the chain of causality — i.e., what must be true to achieve a more macro outcome. For instance, a segment of a chain might look like this:

Causal chains and result maps will be discussed in more detail in a future post.

Deeply understand your customers’ problems, needs, and the options you have to address them.

This is a very high-level summary . Many authors have written about approaches to understanding customer needs, so I will outline some key parts. Use your methodology of choice when seeking to address these questions.

1. What are your customer’s needs, and what problems do they face? (Jobs-to-be-done, continuous discovery, outcome-driven innovation etc.)

2. If addressed, which of these needs or problems support progress towards the outcomes that are important for your organisation's success? (various strategy tools, Wardley mapping, etc.)

3. What are the options for addressing these? (opportunity solution trees, impact mapping etc.)

There are many frameworks and approaches for achieving each of the above, and in later posts, I will elaborate on some of them with examples. Addressing some of these fundamental questions but not others won’t prevent you from making progress.

Not addressing all of these will make it unlikely that you are optimum in decision-making on prioritisation because you will not be assessing how your customer’s needs intersect with your organisation's purpose and strategy. How the answers to these questions interrelate is key to identifying a path to succeeding competitively and communicating the logic behind what you seek to achieve to make progress.

Are all of these concepts in use at your organisation? Which specific practices are you using? Which practices work well together? Please share your experiences in the comments.