It’s all a process problem

close up shot of scrabble tiles on a white surface

In my experience, most problems in product development are process issues. Most problems in product support are process issues. Honestly, most business problems are process problems. But let’s focus on product development problems today.

Process lets us identify and define the ways we do things to get the consistent and repeatable result. Processes are living things because as we learn more, we update our processes to account for what we learned. We continually improve as we go. Or should.

Product development problems

It’s very common in the product development world to promise or scope more than your team can actually deliver. We created Agile to solve this problem. Agile, if you think about it, is a series of processes to get product development under control. We break the product development into smaller parts that can be delivered quickly. And then on to the next part.

Agile is supposed to solve the process problems that arise in the waterfall development method as applied to software. Often, it takes the existing process problems and dresses them up in another coat.

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What sort of problems do I mean? The obvious (and common) product development difficulty is we work on the current sprint and yet, we don’t deliver the Minimum Viable Product on time.

This is a process problem in 1 or more places:

  • Your team has too many (or too big) tasks for sprints: your team needs better processes for defining/identifying the tasks that can be done in the time available.
  • Your team isn’t testing their code well and those issues are delaying release: your team needs better processes for testing when the code is ready.
  • Your team isn’t defining/aligning on what the MVP is: your team needs better processes for defining the MVP more clearly or narrowly.

I’ve seen these difficulties so many times. These should be keeping your Scrum leader awake at night because these are deep product development problems with how your company is doing Agile.

These are not easy difficulties to solve, but these are very certainly process problems. You can’t solve hard problems overnight, but you do need to solve them. Delivering future product depends on solving this. It impacts your bottom-line quarter after quarter.

Process problems create chaos in touchpoint teams

These issues are not only impacting your product development team, they are impacting all the downstream, or touchpoint, teams, like tech comm, UX, marketing, training, support, professional services, DevOps, and so many more. These teams are haggard and tired because they spend too much time trying to make up for the poor upstream processes.

Often, these teams try to generate better process where they touch the product development team to bring sanity to their own processes. And it never works because you can’t make other teams follow processes coming from another team.

I’ve seen situations where the product development team thinks everything is fine, but these touchpoint groups are dying. When asked, they can tell you exactly where the issues are and how to solve them, at least at a high level. Frequently, they’ve been trying to fix the problems and nothing is working. Worst case, I’ve seen defeated teams doing remarkable work in nearly impossible situations.

Chaos is dysfunction and dysfunction isn’t profitable

You may think your touchpoint teams are not working up to their potential. In today’s workplace, a common solution to what are obvious product development problems is to have a layoff and reduce the staffing in the touchpoint teams.

But the product development process difficulties still exist because you didn’t do anything to solve them. You got rid of the defeated or the noisy and kept the people who are still disengaged in solving the problems.

Eventually, your product development problems are going to impact the delivery of your products so badly, sales start to drop. Because in the world of SaaS, you make the case for value to your customers every single day. Your poor product development processes impact customers even though they don’t see your processes–they just see the results of your process problems.

One response to “It’s all a process problem”

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