The Art of Doing Less: How to Maximize Product Development

Looking to focus in on the absolute priorities and ship better products faster? Scrum Inc. consultant Joe Justice shares a story from his work with Team WIKISPEED that serves as the perfect example of what’s possible when you get lean and creative with your product development.

When volunteer-based green automotive company Team WIKISPEED needed to develop a system that would clean and limit tailpipe emissions from its prototype car, founder and CEO Joe Justice didn’t seek out the world’s best engineers to build a revolutionary catalytic converter.
Instead, he turned the product development project loose to anyone who was willing to help the company quickly develop a core product that solved Team WIKISPEED’s most basic challenges.
The reason? As Justice, who is also a lead consultant for Boston-based Scrum Inc., explains in the video below, it allowed the company to maximize productivity and arrive at a very basic prototype solution much quicker than if it had hired a team of the world’s best catalytic engineers.
“If we’d said, ‘Let’s create the world’s best catalytic converter and decided to (outsource) the project to a team of catalytic converter engineers,’ chances are we would have gotten a million dollar prototype that would have taken 18 months or more to build,” Justice says. “And then we would have had to productize it. That’s neither lean nor efficient, and that’s a common problem in real world business management.”

Accelerating Time to “Done”

In a matter of days after posting the project to its website, Team WIKISPEED had an incredible range of people working on a solution — from high school science teams and college students, to grade school kids (and their parents) and professional engineers.

“They had exhaust flowing through bags of charcoal or coffee canisters, and being submerged in boiling water,” Justice recalls. “Ultimately, that produced a very effective, very inexpensive solution that ended up costing us less than $200 per vehicle, and we were able to deliver it in the same sprint.”

Key Takeaways

Avoid Trying to Build ‘Gold Plated’ Solutions
Justice says hardware and software companies too often feel compelled to build perfect products that are loaded with every imaginable feature or functionality. That product development approach is that it often slows productivity, kills focus, and leads to products that are bloated with features customers don’t really need to be happy or successful.
“We find that when we start with test-driven development and build the least amount of stuff to pass a test, we build lean into the system,” Justice says. “It avoids what we sometimes call “gold plating” — where people build everything they need to make the system work.”
You Don’t Need to Ship Everything in Your Backlog
When you have an Agile backlog that’s prioritized by business value, Justice says it’s not always necessary to ship everything in that backlog.

“Sometimes, when you ship the stuff at the top, the stuff at the bottom might not ever need to ship in order to delight your customers and recognize revenue.”

— Joe Justice, Team WIKISPEED and Scrum Inc.

 
“That means you can ship earlier, move on to the next highest value thing, ship it, recognize revenue again, continue delighting customers, and maybe never need to ship the stuff on the bottom.”

Keep Reading: More Resources on Getting Agile with Scrum

A Tale of Two Scrums: Agile Done Right and Agile Gone Wrong In this Labcast, Co-Creator of Scrum Jeff Sutherland explains why Healthcare.gov was such a software development disaster, and why Spotify, on the other hand, is a terrific example of Agile done right. Read more.

3 Big Benefits of Scrum and Why It Beats Waterfall for Product Development Getting more accomplished in less time is every manager’s dream — Scrum makes it a reality. Scrum coach and expert Kenny Rubin explains the benefits of adopting an agile framework and why it beats waterfall for product development. Read more.

 
Photo by: martinak15