Profit from short development cycles now!

You want to build the perfect product, loved by your users and customer, containing all the features and is intuitive to use. Sounds good, but how do you get there? Can you avoid ending up with a product that doesn’t meet user needs, a product that needs to be reworked over and over. How can you know what the right product looks like? How can you know what customers need and what users actually will use?

As you probably wish to have answers to the above questions rather early, you want to decrease uncertainty, minimize risk, fail and learn fast. What would be the best way to achieve all that, lower uncertainty, risk and learn fast?

A good way to go is to build small product increments, make them available to you customers and see if and how they use the product. With that you establish very short and fast feedback cycles and you will learn fast.

In order to build small increments you need to implement practices and be disciplined with these practices. However, short development cycles to build small increments also have challenges to overcome. Let’s see what these challenges are and how you can overcome them.

Collect and process feedback

When you get early feedback, you need to be prepared to process the feedback, learn from it and build you learnings into your next product increment. You definitely want to avoid adapting your product to each feedback you’ll get! That means you need to collect the feedback in a structured way, recognize common themes, make sense out of it, decide what to build or not to build next, prioritize and actually scope the next increment accordingly.

In essence you need a structured way to gather and process feedback, same way as you have a structured way f building and delivering you product.

Scoping the next increments

…and ideally just the next increments. As you will collect feedback and learn from it, there would be higher risk of waste if you already scope the next few increments. You should have an idea of what to build in the future. Just don’t put an extensive amount of work in refining that future increments. If you learn somethings else from previous increments, you work will be a waste of time.

At the same time you need to be clear on what the next product increment should be. As you work in short cycles you have limited capacity and can not build everything you learned into you product in a cycle. You need to build what matters! Therefore the structured way of processing feedback, which will result in a backlog for you next product increment is essential. You should be able to answer questions like: How can you be sure what the next increment should contain? How do you know that your decisions are a good decision?

Keep you workflow relevant

Not only the product but also other factors probably change over time. Such as team composition, skills of team members (ideally improve over time), the economical climate, the organization and so on. Your workflow from ideas and learnings to shipment should be tailored around creating a valuable product. What helped you to ship a valuable product one year ago might not help you nowadays anymore.

Therefore you need to inspect and adapt your workflow frequently. While doing that avoid changing too many things at once but just adapt slightly and see whats working for you. Another short feedback loop!

Balance your work life

Working in cycles or iterations can lead to just chasing the next increment to done and the next and the next after that next. This way of working can be very intense and impact team members negatively, in worst case even lead to burn out. Just be aware that short cycles doesn’t need to increase intensity. The team needs to work at a sustainable pace to support the product over the long run.

If you see signs of intensity, make this an explicitly inspect and adapt that. Ask what you need to change to work at a sustainable pace! Ask what you need to change in order to have time for personal development! Consider what is important to team members! Also consider the relationships amongst team members!

Strategy

When you work from cycle to cycle you easily can loose the long term view and the product strategy out of sight. You need to zoom out and put your strategy glasses on regularly. Ideally you go from bigger picture to details in each of your prioritization or planning events. The feedback and learnings can influence and change your strategy as well. Therefore you workflow should have these loops between strategy and daily work build in!

Overhead

When you scale down or start with short cycles be aware regular events or activities, such as planning, innovation, etc. These events or activities can increase overhead when not scaled down with the cycle time. If you work with a short cycle, planning should be a short event! If you work in short cycle, inspect and adapt should be short! There is a lot of potential in all areas to scale down with the cycle time. The way could collect feedback can be open or focused. Your prioritization can be fast or a lengthy process. When overhead is too present, make it subject t inspect and adapt!

While there are certainly other challenges you have faced or might face I can truly recommend the book Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love in that context. In my earlier post here I describe how to create Minimal Marketable Products as supporting read to this post. Further I would like to hear from you, whether it is even worth doing product development in short cycles with all that challenges? What was your hardest challenge with short cycles?