Quintessential Product Development

In my most recent book “Quintessence” I map out the details of what makes for highly effective software development organisations.

As fas as software development organisations are concerned, it’s a bit of a moot point – as software is generally something to be avoided, rather than sought (see also: #NoSoftware).

“The way you get programmer productivity is by eliminating lines of code you have to write. The line of code that’s the fastest to write, that never breaks, that doesn’t need maintenance, is the line you never had to write.”

~ Steve Jobs 

Foundational Concepts

There are just a few complementary concepts that mark out the quintessential product development company. These are:

• Whole Product.
• Systematic Product Management.
• Whole Organisation (systems thinking).

Whole Product

The quintessential product development organisation embraces the concept of “whole product”. Which is to say, these organisations emphasise the need to have every element of a product i.e. core product elements plus a range of “intangibles” – everything that is needed for the customer to have a compelling reason to buy (Mckenna 1986).

Systematic Product Management

Quintessential product development organisations take a systematic approach to flowing new product ideas and features through a number of stages – often in parallel (Ward 1999) – to predictably arrive at a successful new product in the market:

• Inception – spotting a gap in the market, a.k.a. some (potential customer) needs going unmet, interesting enough to do some discovery.
• Discovery – uncovering and proving the real needs of customers, the things they value, the likely usability of possible solutions, the feasibility of meeting everyone’s needs, and the viability of a product as a means to these ends. In essence, the key risks facing the proposed product. 
• Implementation – building a whole product solution, i.e. both core elements and “intangibles”.
• Launch – Placing the product on sale (or otherwise making it available to customers).
• Feedback – Seeing how the market responds.
• Pivot or Augmentation – Acting on feedback to either reposition the solution (in response to unfavourable feedback) or to incrementally update / extend the “whole product” offering to continually strengthen the product’s value proposition and appeal.
• Cash Cow – Reap the commercial rewards of a strong product and market share.
• Sunsetting – Wind down the product in a way that meets the ongoing needs of all the Folks That Matter™️ (e.g. continued support, spare parts, etc.; easing customers’ transition to newer products; etc.). 

Whole Organisation

It’s common for organisations to think in terms of silos. A Product Management or Product Development silo being but one more silo in a long and ever-lengthening list. 

In the quintessential organisation, the whole organisation is geared around – amongst other things – the task of regularly and predictably getting new products and new product features/updates out the door and into the hands of customers. In the longer term, new products are the life blood of most organisations, especially in the technology industries.

We only have to look e.g. Toyota and their TPDS (Toyota Product Development System) to see both an example of how this works in practice, and the huge benefits of the whole-organisation approach.

Quintessential product development organisations embrace a range of progressive ideas such as Prod•gnosis and Flow•gnosis.

– Bob

Further Reading

Marshall, R.W. (2013). Product Aikido. [online] Think Different Available at: https://flowchainsensei.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/productaikido041016.pdf [Accessed 13 Jan. 2022].

Mckenna, R. (1986). The Regis Touch: New Marketing Strategies for Uncertain Times. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Pub. Co.

Perri, M. (2019). Escaping The Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value. O’Reilly.

Ward, A.C. (1999). Toyota’s Principles of Set-Based Concurrent Engineering. [online] MIT Sloan Management Review. Available at: https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/toyotas-principles-of-setbased-concurrent-engineering/. [Accessed 13 Jan. 2022].

ICYMI: Why Milk is Thicker than Water

In case you missed it:

Why Milk is Thicker than Water

ICYMI: Product Development Flow

In case you missed it:

Product Development Flow

 

Software Development at Scale

Scaled Agile – or scaling agile – seems like a hot potato at the moment. Here’s a few
thoughts:

Scaled Agile? Don’t. Just don’t. For GOD’S sake don’t.

Agile even at a small scale doesn’t work and scaling something that doesn’t work just leads to an even bigger mess that doesn’t work. Take a look at SAFe if you don’t believe it. Or just listen to Ackoff:

“The righter we do the wrong thing, the wronger we become. When we make a mistake doing the wrong thing and correct it, we become wronger. When we make a mistake doing the right thing and correct it, we become righter. Therefore, it is better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right.”

Mindset (Obvs.)

Mindset (a.k.a. culture, memeplex) over methods, tools, etc.. What an organisation, collectively, believes and assumes has far more impact on e.g. productivity, quality, etc. than any methods or tools. See: Organisational Psychotherapy, the Marshall Model, and my new book, “Memeology“.

The only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture. 

~ Edgar Schein

The thing I have learned at IBM is that culture is everything. It took me to age fifty-five to figure that out.

~ Lou Gerstner, CEO, IBM

If you get the culture right, most of the other stuff will just take care of itself.

~Tony Hsieh, CEO, Zappos.com

And Schein also provides us with a definition for “the culture of an organisation”:

Culture is the deeper level of basic assumptions and beliefs that are shared by members of an organisation, that operate unconsciously and define in a basic ‘taken for granted’ fashion an organisation’s view of its self and its environment…

It’s a pattern of shared basic assumptions invented, discovered, or developed by a given group.

~ Edgar Schein

Flow Efficiency

Goldratt wrote the book on Flow Efficiency (see “The Goal”, in case you’re interested).

Flow efficiency is miles better than resource efficiency (a.k.a. utilisation). What is flow efficiency? I’m sure you can look it up. But for the lazy: Flow efficiency suggest a focus on keeping work moving through its various value-adding steps, with minimal or zero queues and wait times, thereby attending to folks’ needs (value to the Folks That Matter) – and prompting feedback – as quickly as possible.

Formalise Innovation

Formalise innovation, evolve into continuous organisational transformation.

What do I mean by “innovation”?
In the context of organisations, here are a few possible definitions of “innovation”:

•  A process by which a method, a product, or a service is renewed and refreshed by applying new ideas or introducing new techniques to create new value.
• Turning an idea into a solution that adds value from the perspective of the folks that matter
• A new strategy (means) for attending to the needs of the folks that matter.
• The application of ideas that are novel and useful.
• Staying relevant – keeping pace with changes to the (business) environment.
• The implementation of something new – until it’s implemented it’s just an idea.
• Stop talking about innovation. Focus on organisational transformation.

Here’s my preferred definition:

Innovation: Delivering against an idea which meets a specific set of needs, for all the Folks That Matter.

And “formalise”? What the hell does that mean, exactly? In effect, institute trainings, standard work, measures, etc., around the whole innovation (and, a.s.a.p., organisational transformation) piece.

I’ve been brief here to avoid a rant. Do get in touch if you’d like me to elaborate on some of these themes.

– Bob

Cognitive Function

How often do you get pissed off by interruptions and distractions? You know, when you’re zoned in on something, in a state of flow, and something happens to break the flow? Personally, when I’m writing code, I have to be in a quiet place, by myself or with my pair or mob, else I can’t get anything done for the continual distractions.

This is but one example of how easily cognitive function can be impaired.

Common sources of cognitive impairment:

• Distractions and interruptions
• Stress (specifically, negative stress a.k.a. distress) Cf Amygdala Hijack
• Tiredness, fatigue, lack of sleep.
• Multitasking
• Poverty
• Diet
• Shift patterns
• Noise and other forms of environmental stressors (lighting, odours, vibrations, exposure to particulates, elevated carbon dioxide, etc.)
• Physiological issues (such as colds and flu, hypoglycemia, aphasia, depression, dehydration, hypertension, obesity, trauma, diabetes, Parkinson’s, POTS, dementia, hypoxia, atrial fibrillation)
• Substance abuse (drink, drugs, etc. – short and long term effects, chronic and acute)

Wow. That’s quite a list. Seems like almost anything can impair cognitive function.

Why Does this Matter?

So why does cognitive function matter. What’s the connection with knowledge work? I’ll spell it out in case it’s not clear:

Knowledge work – such as software development – by definition involves working with our brains. If our brains are performing well (i.e. effective or relatively high cognitive functioning) then we can expect our work to go well, things to get done quicker, with fewer errors, and so on.

Conversely, when our cognitive function is impaired, our brains will take longer to accomplish tasks, come up with less effective solutions, commit more errors, and generally perform more ineffectively.

It’s also likely that with impaired cognitive function we’ll be less reflective, with less energy or capacity to spend on thinking about our work, our relationships, our behaviours, our practices, our customers, possible innovations, our needs and the needs of others, etc..

Does it sound to you like non-impaired cognitive function is something worth having? Something worth paying attention to?

Paying Attention?

So how many folks – managers, workers, organisations – pay any attention AT ALL to folks’ cognitive functioning in the workplace or whilst working? I’d suggest the answer is none, or as near none as makes no difference.

Which seems strange to me, if we truly seek our collaborative knowledge work (and workers) to be as effective as possible. Of course, that objective may be a false assumption. Maybe blissful ignorance and indifference is preferable to paying attention and taking action? Given the reluctance I’ve encountered when broaching this subject, I suspect blissful ignorance and/or indifference holds sway.

How does it go in your organisation?

– Bob

Solutions Demand Problems

I’m obliged to Ben Simo (@QualityFrog) for a couple of recent tweets that prompted me to write this post:

I very much concur that solutions disconnected from problems have little value or utility. It’s probably overdue to remind myself of the business problems which spurred me to create the various solutions I regularly blog about.

FlowChain

Problem

Continually managing projects (portfolios of projects, really) is a pain in the ass and a costly overhead (it doesn’t contribute to the work getting done, it causes continual scheduling and bottlenecking issues around key specialists, detracts from autonomy and shared purpose, and – from a flow-of-value-to-the-customer perspective – chops up the flow into mini-silos (not good for smooth flow). Typically, projects also leave little or no time, or infrastructure, for continually improving the way the work works. And the project approach is a bit like a lead overcoat, constraining management’s options, and making it difficult to make nimble re-adjustments to priorities on-the-fly.

Solution (in a Nutshell)

FlowChain proposes a single organisational backlog, to order all proposed new features and products, along with all proposed improvement actions (improvement to the way the work works). Guided by policies set by e.g. management, people in the pool of development specialists coalesce – in small groups, and in chunks of time of just a few days – around each suitable highest-priority work item to see it through to “done”.

Prod•gnosis

Problem

Speed to market for new products is held back and undermined by the conventional piecemeal, cross-silo approach to new product development. With multiple hands-offs, inter-silo queues, rework loops, and resource contentions, the conventional approach creates excessive delays (cf cost of delay), drives up the cost-of-quality (due to the propensity for errors), and the need for continual management  interventions (constant firefighting).

Solution (in a Nutshell)

Prod•gnosisproposes a holistic approach to New Product Development, seeing each product line or product family as an operational value stream (OVS), and the ongoing challenge as being the bringing of new operational value streams into existence. The Prod•gnosis approach stipulates an OVS-creating centre of excellence: a group of people with all the skills necessary to quickly and reliably creating new OVSs. Each new OVS, once created, is handed over to a dedicated OVS manager and team to run it under day-to-day BAU (Business as Usual).

Flow•gnosis

Problem

FlowChain was originally conceived as a solution for Analytic-minded organisations. In other words, an organisation with conventional functional silos, management, hierarchy, etc. In Synergistic-minded organisations, some adjustments can make FlowChain much more effective and better suited to that different kind of organisation.

Solution (in a Nutshell)

Flow•gnosis merges Prod•gnosis and FlowChain together, giving an organisation-wide, holistic solution which improves organisational effectiveness, reifies Continuous Improvement, speeds flowof new products into the market, provides an operational (value stream based) model for the whole business, and allows specialists from many functions to work together with a minimum of hand-offs, delays, mistakes and other wastes.

Rightshifting

Problem

Few organisations have a conscious idea of how relatively effective they are, and of the scope for them to become much more effective (and thus profitable, successful, etc.). Absent this awareness, there’s precious little incentive to lift one’s head up from the daily grind to imagine what could be.

Solution (in a Nutshell)

Rightshifting provides organisations with a context within which to consider their relative effectiveness, both with respect to other similar organisations, and more significantly, with respect to the organisation’s potential future self.

The Marshall Model

Problem

Few organisations have an explicit model for organisational effectiveness. Absence of such a model makes it difficult to have conversations around what actions the organisation needs to take to become more effective. And for change agents such as Consultants and Enterprise Coaches attempting to assist an organisation towards increased effectiveness, it can be difficult to choose the most effective kinds of interventions (these being contingent upon where the organisation is “at”, with regard to its set of collective assumptions and beliefs a.k.a. mindset).

Solution (in a Nutshell)

The Marshall Model provides an explanation of organisational effectiveness. The model provides a starting point for folks inside an organisation to begin discussing their own perspectives on what effectiveness means, what makes their own particular organisation effective, and what actions might be necessary to make the organisation more effective. Simultaneously, the Marshall Model (a.k.a. Dreyfus for Organisations) provides a framework for change agents to help select the kinds of interventions most likely to be successful.

Organisational Psychotherapy

Problem

Some organisations embrace the idea that the collective organisational mindset – what people, collectively believe about how organisations should work – is the prime determinant of organisational effectiveness, productivity, quality of life at work, profitability, and success. If so, how to “shift” the organisation’s mindset, its collective beliefs, assumptions and tropes, to a more healthy and effective place? Most organisations do not naturally have this skill set or capability. And it can take much time, and many costly missteps along the way, to acquire such a capability.

Solution (in a Nutshell)

Organisational Psychotherapy provides a means to accelerate the acquisition of the necessary skills and capabilities for an organisation to become competent in continually revising its collective set of assumptions and beliefs. Organisational Psychotherapists provide guidance and support to organisations in all stages of this journey.

Emotioneering

Problem

Research (cf Buy•ology ~ Martin Lindstrom) has shown conclusively that people buy things not on rational lines, but on emotional lines. Rationality, if it has a look-in at all, is reserved for post-hoc justification of buying decisions. However, most product development today is driven by rationality:

• What are the customers’ pain points?
• What are the user stories or customer journeys we need to address?
• What features should we provide to ameliorate those pain points and meet those user needs?

Upshot: mediocre products which fail to appeal to the buyers’ emotions, excepting by accident. And thus less customer appeal, and so lower margins, lower demand, lower market share, and slower growth.

Solution (in a Nutshell)

Emotioneering proposes replacing the conventional requirements engineering process (whether that be big-design-up-front or incremental/iterative design) – focusing as it does on product features – with an *engineering* process focusing on ensuring our products creaate the emotional responses we wish to evoke in our customers and markets (and more broadly, in all the Folks That Matter™).

The Antimatter Principle

Problem

How to create an environment where the relationships between people can thrive and flourish? An environment where engagement and morale is consistently through the roof? Where joy, passion and discretionary effort are palpable, ever-present and to-the-max?

Solution (in a Nutshell)

The Antimatter Principle proposes that putting the principle of “attending to folks’ needs” at front and centre of all of the organisation’s policies is by far the best way to create an environment where the relationships between people can thrive and flourish. Note: this includes policies governing the engineering disciplines of the organisation, i.e. attending to customers’ needs at least as much as to the needs of all the other Folks That Matter™.

– Bob

The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work

Here’s an excerpt (pp 206) from “Birth Of the Chaordic Age” by Dee Hock, about “an odd project management scheme” they adopted in the early days – circa 1974:

“Swiftly, self-organisation emerged. An entire wall became a pinboard with every remaining day calendared across the top. Someone grabbed an unwashed coffee cup and suspended it on a long piece of string pinned to the current date. Every element of work to be done was listed on scraps of paper with the required completion date and the name of the person who had accepted the work. Anyone could revise the elements, adding tasks or revising dates, providing they coordinated with others affected. Everyone, at any time, could see the picture emerge and evolve. They could see how the whole depended on their work, and how their work was connected to every other part of the effort. Groups constantly assembled in front of the board as need and inclination arose, discussing and deciding in continuous flow; then dissolving as needs were met. As each task was completed its scrap of paper would be removed. Each day, the cup and string moved inexorably ahead.”

I’m struck by the similarities with FlowChain, and as with FlowChain, it seems an exemplar of simplicity and flow. I also note the implicit “Advice Process” vibe, and the emphasis on “making the work visible” (Cf Personal Kanban).

– Bob

Further Reading

Birth of the Chaordic Age ~ Dee Hock

Metaflow

If you’re in business for anything more than a one-hit-wonder, you may have given some thought to your next product. Albeit probably not much more than a few cursory thoughts, given the attention that you current product(s) demand of you.

Product Development And Delivery Flow

Some lucky few may have moved from the idea of economies of scale, maximising utilisation, etc., to the idea of flow. Flow of products from raw materials to finished and sold goods (or services). And flow of product ideas and new features into those products and product lines.

Prod•gnosis

Fewer again may have adopted something like Prod•gnosis, where ideas for each new product or service get deliberately “developed” into a new operational value stream:

(click for larger image)

With this kind of approach, people (in the green box) who specialise in creating new operational values streams can bring their talents, expertise and continuous improvements to bear on each new operational value stream (blue boxes) they “develop” for the organisation.

Aside: The Toyota Product Development System (TPDS) works much like this, with circa 100 people co-located in a Big Room, or Obeya, for the 15 months or so that it takes Toyota to transform a new product line (vehicle) idea into a new, running operational value stream (blue box).

Metaflow

If we consider the whole organisation, over time, then whether we use the above approach or no, there will a whole series of operational value streams (blue boxes) starting up, operating for a time, e.g. whilst profitable, and eventually shutting down:

(click for larger image)

We might like to see our blue boxes flow into the organisation (start up), with as smooth and effective a flow as possible. This is what I call metaflow: the effective flow of operational value streams “into” an organisation.

Ultimately, I guess it depends on how much you need new products and services to flow, and how much you need the benefits that can bring you.

– Bob

Further Reading

The Principles Of Product Development Flow ~ Don Reinertsen