3.3 Identify product increment

Choosing what to build next is often hard. How do you balance a small, fast-moving feature with making a big impact? How can it be “feature complete” and also a piece of the whole?

Photo by Abdul Kayum on Unsplash

Introduction

In the previous chapter, 3.1 Value mapping, we defined an increment as:

The smallest amount of work that delivers a high-value feature into your customer’s hands.

We also established the value of each feature. Remember that value is entirely defined from your customer’s perspective. Now that we have a clear understanding of what’s valuable, it’s time to deliver with impact.

“Deliver with impact” means picking the one thing that your customer cares about most and putting it in their hands — in a usable, feature-complete fashion.

In my experience, I’ve seen a lot of teams struggle with choosing what to build next. Sometimes we get lucky and it’s easy — more often, it’s hard. We have to balance a number of challenges, each of which pushes against the others:

1. We have to keep the increment small. We want to keep iterations short, and put new, usable software into our customer’s hands as often as possible.

2. It’s got to be feature complete. This means it has to be done; we can’t go back and revisit it in the future, because that would mean we never actually delivered the feature.

3. The feature we deliver has to be the most important feature, right now, to your customer. No other priority matters.

If you use the referral button below, you’ll earn free premium access to Customer Obsessed Engineering. Just three referrals will earn a free month!

We have to manage these challenges or we’ll undermine our own ability to deliver in the eyes of our customer. Remember that success is defined from your customer’s perspective. That means avoiding a few traps:

1. It’s not about what we want, or what we think is important. Ultimately what matters is that our customer gets what they want.

2. Likewise it should never be about technology. As technologists it’s easy to fall prey to the allure of newer, or better, or faster — but if it doesn’t serve our customer, it doesn’t matter.

3. We have to engage in tough conversations. Explaining the implications of technology choices to our customer can take a lot of work, but it’s necessary — because feature priority is their call. It’s our job to inform that decision.

4. We have to recognize that constant progress needs to be visible. That might seem to slow us down (with deliveries, demos, and explanations). The alternative is isolation, lack of progress, and the perception that we aren’t meeting goals.

Inform, don’t insist

When I say we have to inform the decision, I mean we need to support and guide our customer so they can make the right decision.

For example, what if your customer is completely focused on getting a feature out the door — but you know that first, you need to build a foundation or it won’t work?

By informing our customer, we’re establishing a shared understanding of what’s necessary. It’s not enough to say, “this is the way it’s done,” or “you need to have an encrypted secret store before we set up account management.” Neither of those statements tells the customer why.

Instead, we need to engage with the customer and explain why their desired feature needs a foundation. “We can set up account management without encrypting data, but then anyone could access our users’ personal data. Company employees or someone outside sniffing around our network. Plus, we won’t pass our HIPAA or SOC2 certification. We can do it later, it will cost us at least two or three times as much in time and effort, maybe more — what do you want us to do?”

My point here is that there is no overriding your customer. There is no situation in which you’ll say, “well, actually, this is more important than what you want.” If you find yourself in that situation, it means you and your customer are not communicating. The decision is theirs. All we can do is inform that decision.

Often, we have to consciously invert our thinking. We need to recognize what our customer cares about, and understand that’s all that matters. Then reframe our conversation around what they care about.

A case in point

It’s common to have tough conversations during increment planning. In fact, it’s probably more rare to reach quick, easy agreement. So why is it such a hard conversation to have?