Why make it difficult when you can do it easily? Why keep making large investments for a product development of a year or more, while you have no idea whether the product will still meet the customer’s needs at launch?
Get a grip on your investments again, be customer-oriented and ensure optimal products and business operations. Maybe it’s time for incremental development!
Start small
Instead of defining big projects, start small. Not something that will take a year, but deliver a product in a short time[een deel van]. Even if there is already an existing product, make additions in small steps. We call this incremental development.
In this process, people work with building blocks that we call epics. You define these epics; where is the real value I want to deliver for the customer? What’s the difference and what can I do better?
Then you formulate a hypothesis. What is the minimum required to test this hypothesis? You can test this with customers. Only then do you choose to invest more.
Why incremental development?
When you build the minimum for the customer, you quickly get feedback from the customer and can then develop it further to the next step. Because of that feedback, the product will always be close to the customer’s wishes and the investments are really well spent. When you develop a large piece for the customer 1 x, you run the risk that the customer can’t do anything with it or that a lot of adjustments are needed. Even in the event that the hypothesis is not true, you can stop it in time and not much money has been invested yet.
Results
In practice, we see that this way of working delivers value faster, because you get feedback faster. This way you maintain flexibility. You quickly know whether or not you are investing further in a product. The difference with before where work was done on large projects, is that a small group of customers is involved in developing the first piece of functionality and that you quickly receive critical feedback. This makes you much more critical of customer focus. This makes incremental development an efficient way to divide large projects into steps and therefore quickly know whether you are on the right path.
Getting used to
We can also imagine that Portfolio Management is not yet completely used to this way of working. What helps is to see it as an experiment. Start with incremental development and discover what it delivers.
How can you start?
Define what the project will be. What do you really want to achieve? Why is my customer going to pay for this? How is it different from the competition or better than my current product? By making hypotheses, you start to think differently; what is really important to test? This actually determines what you are going to develop.
Do you want a helping hand with this? Feel free to call us: 085 2735185
We are happy to help you on your way!
