Don’t let your tech team leave you and others hanging: ensure every demo, status report, and standup puts business value front and centre.
Anton Chekhov advised playwrights never to put a rifle on the stage in the first act unless a character was going to fire it in the second. When you or your engineers don’t report on the commercial outcomes of a technical initiative, you similarly let down your audience: you’re leaving out what should be the climax of the narrative, the added revenue or slashed cost or improved reputation that the tech change was supposed to produce. That’s why I hate “activity metrics” like velocity or story points or features delivered; they only tell half the story, and it’s the boring half! Your developers and product managers should be measuring and being accountable for the business results of their work constantly, and you should reward them for doing so even when they report they failed to reach their target–after all, an experiment with a negative result is a success, not a failure.
This first appeared in my weekly Squirrel Squadron email, which goes out every Monday, and was originally posted on 17th October 2022. To get my provocative thoughts and tips direct to your inbox first, sign up here: https://squirrelsquadron.com