The Pitfalls of Prioritizing Features over Outcome
Teams do not measure the impact of their work. Or, if measurement happens, it is done in isolation by the product management team and shared. You will need to find out if your work is working.
Instead of compelling missions or initiatives, teams deal in feature and project assignments — chronic multitasking and over-utilization. You can tell much about an organization by what it celebrates — no removed features. The primary measure of success is delivered features, not provided outcomes. Work is rarely discarded in light of data and learning — infrequent discussions about desired customer and business outcomes.
Product managers do not conduct regular retrospectives on the quality of their product decisions. They compare expected benefits to actual benefits. The team needs to connect work to crucial business and customer satisfaction metrics.
Developers have “passing tests,” but product managers do not. Product managers view velocity and output as their key performance indicators. A mismatch between prioritization rigor (deciding what gets worked on) and validation rigor (choosing if it was the right thing to work on). Prioritization rigor is designed only to temper internal agendas so people “feel confident”. Much work goes into determining which ideas to work on, leaving little leeway for adjustments and improvisation based on data.
Front-loaded process in place to “get ahead of the work” so that items are “ready for engineering.” Once work is “done,” the team moves immediately to the next “project,” leaving no time to iterate based on qualitative and quantitative data. Roadmaps show features, not areas of focus and outcomes.
The team is not involved in research, problem exploration, or experimentation and validation. Once work is shipped, the team needs more contact with the support, customer success, and sales. Without the mandate to experiment, features are delivered in single large batches instead. You might still work in sprints (yay, we’re “Agile”), but nothing new is reaching customers after each sprint. Low visibility for refactoring work and debt work-down. Low visibility for value delivery capabilities. Software developers and app dev firms fail spectacularly in this regard. We organize ourselves and sell labor based on what tools we use while our customers tell us what to do.
The primary measure of success is new feature output. Little appreciation for the health of the whole product as opposed to shiny new objects. Little awareness of the impact of new features on the usability (and maintainability and extensibility) of existing products.
[¹]: Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization?
