Roadmap planning - Pitching Ideas
When I introduced Ready, Learn, Do for software development (1) I left a hint of how it might also change team operations. Ready(ing) an idea means understanding its cost and value. So what we got is a way to transmit motivation to invest in a problem (or not). In other words, we got a pitch.
By using Ready, Learn, Do we bake roadmap planning for teams and organizations into the process. How that is done in detail is the focus of this post.
Get Ready … Pitch
You are a Product Owner and see an opportunity for a new feature. You take a day and collect as much information as you can to construct a value proposition and a rough map of potential space (2). During the next planning, it is go-time and you present your idea. Or maybe you are an engineer on the same team and you think it is time to revamp your deployment setup. So you go ahead, take some time, and ready your pitch.
The basic idea is that the discovery of opportunity is distributed across the team. No single lead is responsible for figuring out what comes next (E1). Instead, you leverage the experience and creativity of the team. From a junior engineer to the most senior member everyone can pitch in an idea for a project or task. Nothing is too big or too small.
When to Pitch?
In my experience, having some fixed points in your calendar is always good. Be it for 1-1s, reviews, or in this case pitching new ideas. I assume most teams have some kind of backlog refinement anyway. So why not use that? You come in, some people prepared and already shared the ideas they want to show, and now it is time to discuss them. Do you see more unknowns? Do you agree with the cost and value proposition?
If you agree, as a team, that it is a worthwhile effort go to the next step otherwise you, who presented the idea, put it aside. Maybe now is not the right time or there are some more points you have to consider. It could also mean that it is just not valuable enough to do which is also good to know.
How to Prioritize
Of course, there are almost always more good ideas than time to work on them. So what do you do with the rest? Just putting it all in a backlog means you create a graveyard. The number of ideas grows and most of them are stuck in there forever. So we prioritize and remove what gets too old.
Is this change impacting your team, other teams, or your users? Is its effort low or high? Is the impact low or high? There are rough qualitative measures that tell you where to place a task or project in value space.
Is feature A impacting your users a lot but to make it work will take months? We should probably do it but maybe focus on B first which is a low-hanging fruit in comparison. Or maybe you do some high-impact work that improves how you operate as a team. For me, there is no clear-cut rule on how to decide what is most important. In the end, it depends on your team’s context and it is something you have to reevaluate every time.
Based on that classification you can order your work and from here everyone just starts to pick from the top.
To address the graveyard problem we just have to add one constraint to this structure. Whatever gets older than X months is removed. What X you feel comfortable with depends on you. Maybe you move fast and 3 months is your limit. Or you are a bit more conservative and aim for 12 months instead. Whatever it is make it explicit and stick to that rule (E2).
Pitching upwards
As long as tasks stay small deciding within your team what to work on is fine but what if you try to commit to some months-long journey or you do need the support of other teams? In that case, you have to pitch upwards. If it is affecting your domain address the domain lead. If it is even bigger they have to bubble it up to the highest rank appropriate (E3).
And then there are those really large projects that are often shifts in how the product or company works. Often they come from the top and ripple down the organization. But at the beginning, I said that pitching allows a team to leverage the experience of all members. I believe the same is true for your whole organization. Why not open up the floor for big ideas for everyone and not just senior leadership?
What would need to change is to have some fixed point in your calendar where everyone can book a 5min slot to present their idea. From leadership to junior members. What counts is your idea and not your rank. Of course, that also requires that decision-makers join those meetings and are willing to commit time to ideas that look promising. The hurdle to do that should be lower tho when Ready, Learn, Do is applied.
Unfortunately, that last process I haven’t experienced or seen implemented anywhere so far but it is an idea I would like to try out at some point.
Coming to an end, the result of the Ready phase should be a pitch for your idea. A summary of the unknowns, costs, and values that could be gained. You might just do that in 10min because it is a small thing, or you want to go big and prepare a “real” pitch deck. In the end, the idea is that everyone can participate in setting the course of their team and organization.
Read on
Epilogue
(E1): They are still accountable tho. They have to make sure the team goes in the right direction. Now they just open up the floor for those kinds of discussions to all members.
(E2) Now you might say “But don’t we lose good ideas which we might implement later on?”. Maybe. In my experience, if it really is a good idea or issue that needs resolution, it comes back later anyway just that the context changed in a way that we can actually invest time in it.
Or it isn’t as worthwhile as you believe. If a task stays in your backlog for let’s say 12 months untouched is it really that valuable?
What I have soon almost everywhere is a backlog with hundreds of items and nobody really has an overview anymore of what is going on. So you go back and slug through the whole thing every now and then to figure out what is still needed. To me that was always more a distraction than it helped.
(E3): Before you pitch up make sure to pitch your idea within your team. That way you gain early feedback and the backing of your team when it comes to bringing it to the next level. Otherwise, there is a good chance that your pitch isn’t tuned in enough and might not receive the full appreciation.
As an aside, leads of a team, domain, etc should be responsible to figure out if a pitch needs buy-in from more senior leadership.
You found a typo or some other mistake I made in this text? All articles can be changed here. If you want to exchange ideas then simply drop me a message at contact@paulheymann.de.