Best-Kept Secrets of Product Development Part 3: Plan to Finish On Time

Image from https://akvo.org/blog/the-key-to-users-happiness-story-mapping/

Here are some of my notes from the amazing “User Story Mapping” book by: Jeff Patton!

Most of these when you read them sound like just common sense but at the same time, super hard to keep in mind while developing products:

The whole theme is:

Plan To Finish On Time

The whole “Estimation”, and “Agile Estimation” is a heated discussion, and I notice these days, while some teams really insist on spending a lot of time trying to estimate how long things would take to build, others don’t care so much and just focus on value and customer experience.

But let’s face it, there is always some people in the team that would ask for estimates and basically, one of the first questions that engineering teams need to answer is: “How long does it take to build it?”

So here we go, the magical best-kept secrets of product development all with focusing on “Planning to Finish On Time”

I’m going to let you in on one of the best-kept secrets of good estimation: The best estimates come from developers who really understand what they’re estimating.

There are lots of methods that promise to give more accurate estimates. I’m not going to cover any of those here. But I will tell you none of them work if the people building the software don’t have shared understanding with one another, and with those who envisioned it.

Building shared understanding shouldn’t be a well-kept secret about estimation. So you should go tell someone else right now.

One thing that seems to be a secret, but really shouldn’t be, is that estimates are…estimated.

Hit the Web and find any list of oxymorons. I’m confident you’ll find this term there: accurate estimate

If we knew exactly how long things would take, then we wouldn’t have called it an estimate, would we?

But if you build little bits of software, one thing you can be pretty sure of is how long they took to build. That’s called measurement, and that’s quite a bit more accurate.

Ok, so here’s the other secret:

The more frequently you measure, the better you get at predicting.

If you commute to work every day, I suspect you’re pretty good at predicting how long it’ll take. What Would da Vinci Do?

I often ask myself that. OK, I don’t really. But maybe I should.

Product Owners follow a strategy used by artists to finish in time. It’s one I’ve used for years with software.

Great art is never finished, only abandoned.

— Leonardo da Vinci

That quote is attributed to da Vinci, and it speaks to the notion that we could continue to add and refine forever, but that, at some point, we need to deliver the product.

And, if da Vinci’s work and that of lots of other artists are good examples, we (the people who appreciate the work) have no idea it was abandoned. To us, it looks finished.

Use iterative thinking to evaluate and make changes to what you’ve already made. Use incremental thinking to make additions.

All these above “secrets” are from the amazing “User Story Mapping” book by: Jeff Patton!

If you enjoyed these little secrets, I recommend getting his book so you don’t miss out on all the great stuff he talks about in the book:

User Story Mapping by: Jeff Patton

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Let’s be friends on Twitter. Happy Coding :)

Cheer!