Completeness & Correctness = Predictability
A couple of months ago, we were at the Product404 meetup in Atlanta, GA. Scott Sehlhorst, LeadingAgile’s resident Product guru, was on hand to talk about how the folks involved in the Product group can remain Agile while developing and sharing their roadmap.
In this short clip, Scott discusses how Product people can contribute to the organization’s goal of becoming predictable by focusing on completeness and correctness.
Video Transcript:
When we think about organizations, one of the challenges for us as a consulting organization is when we engage with any particular company, we have to identify what that company values and what they’re trying to be, as well as what environment they’re in, because that’s going to influence how they do product management, what are the things that they emphasize. You can think about organizations that value predictability. Think about regulatory compliance, systems of record, developing identity databases. These are things where you don’t expect there to be a lot of change in what you’re trying to accomplish. Your goal is an organization is to make and meet your commitments.
Well, we’ve got large numbers of teams. We have to orchestrate and coordinate work across those teams. And so, we have to be able to be predictable in terms of when we’re going to deliver. We have to be able to coordinate who’s going to deliver which piece of the pie. How do we make sure we build everything that we need to deliver an app? From the outside, project managers and people who aren’t in the team with us can look at it and say, “Oh, they’ve broken down the work. If we go execute all of this work, we’re going to deliver on our objective.” There are two things we have to think about as product folks, and it’s “How do I make sure I’ve got all of the right detailed work” and so completeness and correctness is an analysis technique we can use.
We have an epic. We have some success criteria. We know what we’re trying to accomplish. When we break it down into a set of features, the conversation we are having is: First of all, did we figure out all of the features we need to build to achieve our objective? Did we miss anything? That’s our completeness. We got everything.
Correctness Is coming in and saying, “Is there anything in here that we don’t actually need?”Right, is there gold plating, sugar coating? Is there extra stuff that’s somebody’s pet project, that sort of snuck in, because this is the CEO’s primary objective, “We’re Going Mobile!” And so I want my pet project to happen, I’ll label it as “mobile.”
So that analysis. Is part of the context of what’s going on when we’re managing our roadmap and our feature plan.