rich mironov keynote presentation
TRANSCRIPT
UNPACKING BUSINESS VALUE
AgileCamp Dallas Rich Mironov @richmironov
• Process improvements: throughput, quality, building things right
• Assumes strategic prioritization and useful market outcomes
• Does “Business Value” still taste like customer success?
Agile’s Focus on Velocity
There’s nothing more wasteful than brilliantly engineering a product that doesn’t sell, or a project that doesn’t matter.
• “The Business” separated from “The Team” • Assigned value, not market outcome • Early (fixed) estimates • Prioritizing unlike things algorithmically • Are paying customers saying “yum?”
We’re Forgotten What Real Business Value Tastes Like
Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
• New product/service • Promise of future revenue
• Feature/workflow improvement • Promise of future user happiness
• Technical debt reduction • Promise of future velocity
• Test automation, CI-CD • Promise of faster releases
• System improvements • Promise of future operational savings
Many Flavors of Business Value
Hypothesis: • Project business value estimates +/- 70% • 1 in 10 will deliver zero value Would that change portfolio planning and stakeholder interactions?
Business Value Error Bars >> Development Error Bars
1. Negotiate real trade-offs with decision-makers 2. Relative, like-with-like comparisons 3. Reality-based budgeting (projects don’t end) 4. Get closer with actual users (paying customers)
What Can We Do?
Development can never build as fast as we can dream
• “CEO says it’s really important.” • “We already promised it to a big prospect.” • “How hard could it be? Probably only 10 lines
of code.” • “We’ve been talking about this for months.” • “We’ve gone agile, which gives us infinite
capacity...” • “My neighbor’s kid could do this in an hour.”
Magical Thinking
• Most requests will go unfulfilled • Roadmap: what we are building (instead of new request)? • What commitments would we drop to add this? • Trade-offs among like items
#1: Real Trade-Offs are EXCLUSIVE ORs (not ANDs)
Features for current release
50%
Quality, test automa6on, tech
debt 15%
Management, overhead, 10%
Future R&D, 5%
One-‐offs, non-‐roadmap 20%
Typical Commercial Software Development Budget
Prioritizing Within Buckets #2. Prioritization within buckets
• Quick-sort top candidates • Let us negotiate complex issues • Live stakeholders around the table • WSJF assumes accuracy and independence
that I rarely see
Prioritization Algorithms Get Us 80% There
• Programs/products run for a very long time • Things we dropped from V1.0 • What we learn, new needs,
platform evolution • Yet we budget as if projects end on ship date
• Need sustaining budget until end-of-support
#3: Reality-Based Budgets
• External customers pay our salaries
• Measure satisfaction, adoption, usage, revenue
• Meet them, hear their stories, look for joy
#4: Get Closer to (Paying) Customers
• Talk in terms of paying customers • Use your own products • Listen in on customer calls/
interviews/UX tests* • Ask for success metrics • Look at revenue • Celebrate customer improvements
Things You Can Do (This Week)
• Business Value is essential • Different flavors • Not precise enough for
auto-sort • Sample what your real
customers taste
Take Aways
Rich Mironov
Mironov Consulting San Francisco, CA [email protected] 1.650.315.7394 twitter.com/richmironov linkedin.com/in/richmironov