As leaders who oversee the entire end-to-end value stream, we’re doing our best to improve time to market while making sure that we’re heading in the right direction with our individual products.
But when your decisions are based off guesswork, you might think you’re doing okay when in reality, there are problems lurking just under the surface.
“How are your teams doing” is honestly a trick question, and you’ll probably get different answers based on who you talk to.
If you talk to the developers, for example, they might be quite confident: “Yeah, we’re moving tickets through the board and everything’s going pretty smoothly.”
Talk to the product managers, on the other hand, and they’ll say, “What we’d really like is if we could deliver results faster.”
Head over to the QAs and you’ll get a different answer altogether: “We always have so much to do, we’re always the bottleneck – we need more people!”
You’ll literally receive different answers across the board, based on who you talk to. And that’s because all of these answers are purely anecdotal!
Here’s the thing:
You know something is off. You know that some of your teams really are struggling – they have real problems going on, and they need solutions.
But you don’t know exactly what it is you should be changing. And the last thing you want to do is take potshots without any proof to back up what you’re doing. Especially considering that you are responsible for making far-reaching decisions that involve multiple teams and thousands (or even millions) of end users.
So how do you figure out what direction you need to be heading in? You have to shift the conversation altogether.
It’s All About Process Improvement
Gut feelings, as powerful as they are, aren’t reliable indicators. What you really need is actual data to give you answers. Let’s take a step back and dig deeper into the problem we’re trying to solve.
The ultimate goal we have is to deliver results to our customers quicker, collect feedback quicker and continue to pivot the direction we’re heading with each individual product.
Now, how do you deliver results in the first place? Put simply, your teams follow a set of steps in their product development process that move each piece of work from an idea to a deliverable.
Doesn’t it make sense then to analyze this process to identify opportunities for improvement and actually figure out what’s slowing you down?
You don’t have to ask your teams how they are doing. Instead, to improve time to market you need to put your focus on how the work flows through your process and optimize that process to cut the waste.
And let me tell you, more often than not, it’s about tweaking your management practices just a little bit that leads to massive improvement in your delivery speed. And when I say massive, I really mean achieving results like increasing productivity by 250% in less than 2 months.
So what do I mean by tweaking your management practices “just a little bit”? I’m going to give you one clear example that not only shows you what I’m talking about, but that you can also start implementing as early as tomorrow morning.
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