How do you balance “shipping on time” with ensuring you have the right market insights to prioritize the roadmap correctly? We do 2 week sprints.

Question

DJ Chung · Accepted Answer

Ideally you have the right market insights before you start building. However, if you have open questions, I encourage you to break down the project into smaller milestones you can ship that help you answer those questions. This way, you are continually shipping, but they are smaller in scope, but also helps you de-risk when there's a lack of clarity in market insights.

Lizzy Masotta · Answer

“Agile Research”

This is a term I coined to describe the act of always conducting user interviews. The problem with well-designed research projects is that they take too long and tend to deliver the insights after you’ve started building the thing. Advocate for a “rolling recruit” of your key personas so that you can tap into talking to users *every week.* This ensures you have feedback and insight in the moment you need it most before the product is built and decisions are made. Alternatively, you can create a type of Customer Advisory Board where members opt into research questions, providing feedback, etc on an ongoing basis.

Ingo Wiegand · Answer

* Generally, I think about three fundamental dimensions in product development: time, scope, and resourcing. You will never be able to force all three to your liking, in most cases you will pick two, which in turn determine the third:
    * If you have a team with a given size and you pick a ‘ship date’, you are implicitly making the decision that scope needs to be flexible (i.e., you will have to be OK cutting / adjusting what is getting shipped)
    * If you have a team setup and a clear scope in mind, the time component will be determined based on bottoms-up planning against the required work (i.e., it will be shipped ‘when done’ for the most part)

* It’s worth recognizing that ‘shipping on time’ isn’t a standalone issue, but very quickly moves into a trade-off discussion with the other dimensions.
 * That being said, when discussing scope, it is easy to get into ‘analysis paralysis’ of trying to find ‘perfect’ data/insights to support your product direction. There is no simple answer for ‘how much research is good’, but I like to use the following constructs to think through trade-offs and ensure I’m comfortable with the amount of unknown unknowns and associated risks before moving ahead:
    * Definition of success: being clear on the desired outcomes/target state and how to measure success are critical. Not being clear on this item usually indicates that more research is necessary, otherwise the risk of shipping something ‘on time’ that’s not useful (or needs to be reworked) is high.
    * One-way doors vs. two-way doors: without further research, will you need to make decisions that will lock you and your team into an irreversible path for future product/engineering work? If so, it usually makes sense to assess insights further to make sure that this won’t cause issues down the road. Two-way doors on the other hand (i.e., decisions that are easily adjusted/reversed in the future) keep optionality to iterate and might indicate that it’s worth shipping now and use this as an opportunity to gain more direct customer feedback/insights.
    * “Crawl, walk, run”: sometimes it’s more important to ship small increments quickly to gain traction and learn more about your customers’ needs. It’s worth thinking about whether additional insights/analysis with the currently available information will be faster/give you more confidence in your product decisions than shipping something quickly that will allow you to iterate with customers and get direct feedback that way.

Mike Flouton · Answer

Job number one is ensuring you have the right market insights to prioritize the roadmap correctly. Engineering managers and scrum masters can pick up the slack and keep the trains running on time when you’re falling behind on customer research. Never shortchange market insights!

Related Ask Me Anything Sessions

Shopify Senior Product Lead, Lizzy Masottaon Product Development Process

Barracuda VP, Product Management, Mike Floutonon Product Development Process

Momentive Vice President Of Product Management, Aleks Basson Product Development Process

Related Questions