Intelllex

DEC 2019 – FEB 2021

Shaping our sloppy, slow internal development cycle to a high-speed stream where we focused on sharpened problems, ideation with a bottom-up approach and prioritised according to the timeliness of the business direction. Worked closely with our functional leads to propose a system that would de-risk the projects we select to go into implementation mode.

Shipped 9 shaped projects within half a year; 80% of the team is now engaged with contributing to the roadmap vs. 3 projects in H2 of 2019

Problem

A shoddy and slow product development means disconnected tasks, unclear problems.

Our product development team was suffering from burn-outs from 2-week sprints, conflicting ideas of the roadmap and weak delivery. Majority of the projects ideated at the start of the year overran and people working on tasks felt like they were disconnected. I got in touch with Basecamp's Shape Up e-book that inspired me to bring in a version of the process in and experiment with how we can re-think our cycles. These were some of the issues we were tackling:

Fitting uncertainties and risk into delivery timelines
Fails to pursue other worthy, timely projects
Long projects kill morale
HOW MIGHT WE

Create a high-speed product stream that focuses on solving defined user problems and reduce risk in shaping, planning and building.

Graphic on Shape Up framework

Importance of problem definition

A lot of uncertainties and risk sets in from the beginning of defining our problems. The company gets briefed at the start of year and we were made to ideate projects then and there. So often, our thinking was to simply, zoom straight into "Ok, how can I improve the upload aspect of the application?" "What can we do better?" with zero to little context of the user base. What happens is no one can really align on the same baseline scenario we're helping our users for.

What happens is that, the research to validate and understand the important mental models get conflated into delivery timelines. And, there's very little room to evolve the plan and before we know it, deadlines were missed.

Screenshot of Shape Up learnings

Part of the new approach is to give enough weight and emphasis on the appropriate sharpening of problem space before everybody jumps into solutionising something that will take up 6 months of the year. How can we minimise risk while making sure we have enough information at hand to decide on the action plan?

Some of the other effective outcomes from the approach we've taken

Giving it a fixed time, variable scope

Focus was one of the essential themes of the approach. Before, we are absolutely swamped by distractions such as Jira catch-ups, uncritical bugs. By capping it at fixed 'appetite' – 6, 3 week periods, we are able to rid of the distractions that are blocking the product team from delivering.

Project teams, usually cross-functional players work together closely

Before, functions rarely collaborate, collaboration happened within functions. Now, with a user outcome in focus, we break out into project teams cross-functionally. This made sure that the team has are equipped with all the expertise it needs to move on with the project and kept the team aligned on a shared goal for the appetite.

Encouraging our folks to contribute to the product roadmap

Roadmap is no longer a 'set-in-stone' Gantt chart that is rigid and inflexible. We now revisit what we have on the table every cycle to make sure we answer to the timeliness of our business direction and not sway towards a path that is irreversible, expensive and full of questionable holes.

Cultivating the habit of scope hammering

With a fixed time scope, an important part of the approach is to have absolute focus on the outcome we've set for. In the process of delivering, we might discover more tasks in the way for us to ship what's agreed.

The limited time forces the team to reframe the problem. Everyone make trade-offs about implementation details and sees where to cut scope. We look at what's core, what's peripheral and this pattern motivates the team to regularly question how our implementation decisions are affecting the scope.

OUTCOMEs

Defining clear problems

Align everyone on the big picture

Encouraging raw ideation

Cross-functional teams

HOW ARE WE DOING

Successfully delivered 9 projects from Feb – Sep 2020; with a team of 11 vs. 3 huge projects in H2 2019

We continually review by checking in with our teammates to ensure that they are empowered and not paralysed by this process we set up.

Next, also see
02 Facilitating legislative checks →