Leadership Engagement in Product Development

Business leaders deliver results, not technology solutions.

Business leaders often don’t have an appreciation for the complexity of the technology solutions we are asked to build to help them deliver results.

This disconnect is the cause of so much waste, both on asking for things that aren’t feasible or easy to implement which inevitably lead to development hacks and workarounds to deliver solutions that don’t deliver results to meet an arbitrary date assigned by the leaders who don’t understand the hubris of the ask in the first place.

If there is one thing that business leaders can and should do is to engage with their technology team(s) as they begin to work on a solution. Understanding the technical complexity and more importantly, the various options you might have to deliver what you want can result in new ways of thinking about the solution so that we deliver what is needed and not just is wanted.

The real value you seek is found between a want and need.

Having been a business leader I know I get an idea of what I think will improve operational efficiency, reduce costs, raise revenue, make customers happy, etc….and often leaders think that they are smart enough that their idea needs no review. This is how a project often gets defined and approved.

As a leader, I can’t simply ask for something, decree scope, and date, fund it, and then disengage during the critical development phase. Because what I’ve learned is that what I thought my idea would look like once it was developed, didn’t always come out the way I envisioned.

To develop solutions that can deliver real value you must engage from the beginning. At one organization it wasn’t until our business stakeholders engaged in the discovery process did they start to understand the complexity of their idea and why it was so hard to do everything just the way they wanted.

And what we discovered in these sessions was that contrary to opinion, our business stakeholders were open to suggestions and worked with us to find compromises that ended up allowing us to deliver more valuable features than the had anticipated when we began the effort.

For an agile delivery model to work we have to move away from upfront project management and start with some level of discovery or story mapping that provides some definition to what we are going to start to build and then go from there.