Making Smart Investments is Everyone’s Job
If you have never run a small business, then you are not likely to understand the risk you take every time you decide to invest in something. Make a mistake, and you could materially damage your company’s future. These are very real considerations when you run a business. There is no budget provided to me, to spend on ideas that I think will be valuable. When I invest money in my business, I have to have a good idea of what the value outcome will be before I proceed. Not understanding that can be dangerous to the survival of the business.
However, for almost everyone who works in technology, you rely on a budget that is provided by the company, and in an Agile space where we fund teams, you are supposed to make value decisions related to the product you work in. And another key difference in Agile is that you are told that the best products come through experimentation, which is in most cases true. However as is often the case, we don’t really experiment as forge ahead, focused on what we think is valuable without regard to whether it really delivers quantifiable value.
As a small business owner, I make calculated investments, typically small to start with as I don’t have much cash flow or capital to make larger investments. A product team needs to work in the same vein, but to do so you need a way of quantifying the value outcomes of what you want to build before you start building. Once started you need to track the value realization closely so that you either stop investing if there is no value being returned or continue as the value can be quantified.
Starting your product development efforts with a quantifiable outcome identified, ensures we aren’t losing sight of the goals and objectives of the work. It is too easy to get lost in the challenge of developing new features and forget that we need to deliver value first and foremost.
If you want to develop an investment mindset for your product development teams, let me help build your QValue product scoring model. QValue provides a way to align value outcomes to your strategies while overlaying the cost and potential risks associated with delivery. This provides you with an effective way to make informed decisions on the millions of dollars you spend every year on technology.
If you want to turn your organization upside down from a value perspective, then you need to adopt an investment mindset how to determine the technology efforts you want to take on. Too many organizations spend millions on features and capabilities that deliver little to no value, but because we gauge success on the delivery of the work and not the value the work delivers, we don’t realize the ROI we could from our technology efforts.
To learn more check out QValue at www.soundagile.com
