Defer solution-space work

engin akyurt

1. Quarterly objectives
2. Premature solutions ←
3. Product tsundoku

Quarterly objectives help product teams focus on work that matters, in more than one way. This includes shifting planning conversations from solutions to customer problems, and other opportunities. Quarterly objectives help avoid wasting time and increasing development cost with premature solution discussions.

Solution discussion

When you work on software product development, you probably can’t help thinking about what you’ll work on next. People who’ve never written code in a team suffer from this most, because from an outside perspective, software development takes forever. Teams that fall into this trap start discussing future solutions, and in doing so, they perform premature work.

Premature work on solutions, and planning to work on solutions instead of problems, makes it inconvenient to replan when you learn about better opportunities. You’ll stop changing your plans, and continue building solutions your customers no longer need. Worse yet, when you don’t use the lessons that customer discovery teaches, you’ll stop doing the unused discovery.

The build trap

Melissa Perri calls avoiding this fate Escaping the Build Trap. This starts by challenging the feature-planning assumption, and ultimately leads back to identifying options for problems to work on, aligned with strategy.

Theory of constraints

The classic business novel The Goal (1984) introduced the theory of constraints in a manufacturing context. The story illustrates the idea that (at least) one constraint limits the factory’s throughput, such as a single machine in the factory. Moreover, improving productivity in anything that happens before this bottleneck will increase work in progress (inventory).

Similarly, software product development typically operates under a single constraint, depending on the product lifecycle phase. For example:

1. finding a customer problem worth solving – before product-market fit
2. building a solution to a valuable problem – before getting the first customer
3. selling the product to more of the market – customer growth.

Identifying feature/solution ideas does not constrain any of these phases. Unsurprisingly, premature solution work creates a backlog of unused feature ideas. We typically call this ever-growing backlog a backlog. Unfortunately, too many teams fail to notice the cost of this inventory, or to consider it waste.

Deferred discussion

Discussing the next solution to build only makes sense if you know for sure what you’ll work on next. As long as you have multiple options for which problem to work on next, you have several good reasons not to discuss or work on their solutions.

1. Focus – until you stop working on the current problem, you need to make progress on that.
2. Waste – solution work on problems that you turn out not to work on wastes effort.
3. Prioritisation – you can better use that time to thoroughly understand all candidate problems.

Therefore, defer solution discussions until you start work on that problem. Applying this insight on a daily basis sounds straightforward: just don’t talk about future solutions. In practice, teams find this difficult, because everyone enjoys discussing their ideas.