On Product Focus
Image by Sachin Ghodke on stock.xchng.
Focus is a wonderful thing. When you are focused on the task at hand, you can immerse yourself into your work and ignore distractions. You produce your best work and finish in a timely manner. And even better, you feel good about yourself and your ability to produce quality work.
However, this is all about individual focus. This is important, but not the only aspect of focus. I have found that one of the biggest enemies of successful product management is a lack of product focus. Consider the following scenario:
Jennie has created a wonderful product backlog that is based on solving real market problems for existing and potential customers. Jennie presents the backlog to the development team and gets them excited about evolving the product in this direction. They plan a release with a tentative release date and lay out the preliminary sprints. Half-way through the second sprint, a heavy-weight stakeholder decides that the product needs some other high-priority features. Jennie doesn’t necessarily agree with the priorities, but she goes along with the stakeholder, since he has a lot of power (and after all, the team is supposed to be agile…). Jennie updates the backlog and goes back to the development team. At this point, the development team has just completed laying the foundation for some of the original features and have to stop mid-stride.
Sound familiar?
An interesting aspect of this scenario is that it highlights the delicate balance between being agile and maintaining a certain level of focus. One of the great things about agile is that stakeholders can change their mind. Scrum (a flavor of agile) protects the team from too much change with the rule that scope cannot be changed in the middle of an iteration. This enables the development team to focus for at least 2-4 weeks at a time. However, the product manager needs to help enforce additional focus. Changing direction every 2-4 weeks will not result in the powerful and successful product releases of which you dream.
So what is the answer?
Product managers should preach the gospel of focus. Remind executives and other stakeholders that the best way to get relevant and high-quality products out the door in a timely manner is to allow the product team to focus. This doesn’t mean that we should freeze the roadmap forever and ban changes. However, it does mean that random life-or-death enhancement requests should be discouraged and the requester should be reminded that changing course in the middle of a release will result in ineffective product development.
I have experienced the power of focus and it works - both for individuals and product teams.
Good post, Tabita. Yes I’ve been in a similar situation and it’s often a challenge to get the team focused on one thing, particularly when there are multiple projects and stakeholders vying for priority.
Agree with your point about leaving non-essential changes until later - often they drop off the agenda or get prioritised in another team.