In Favor of the Fixer-Upper

Fixer Upper.jpg

When my wife and I bought our first house (there’s an industry ripe for disruption to the user experience!), glaring inefficiencies aside, it was an eye-opening exercise in prioritization. Turns out finding the perfect house is a tall order, but finding a home that fits most of your criteria isn’t too hard. It all came down to establishing what the bare minimum features were that we wanted in a house. We decided up front that having 3 bedrooms and at least a 1 car garage were unshakeable requirements. Once we’d established this criteria, or our house MVP, we didn’t even consider houses that didn’t have at least these features, among others. Even when a beautifully done, perfectly laid out 2 bedroom house in one of our favorite areas of town hit the market, we didn’t look at it because it didn’t meet our criteria. The first time this happened, it hurt. We felt like we were missing out on a great house. But after a few times, we got used to saying no when it didn’t meet our needs and it became a game! It was almost more fun to reject houses than to actually go look at them. 

    Was this being this strict really necessary? Probably not. After all, with enough time and money, anything is possible. We could have bought that house and considered constructing a third bedroom through an addition. But we didn’t. Instead, we found a wonderful 3 bedroom house with a little less charm, but still met all of our baseline criteria. It had three bedrooms, a two car garage, a private back yard and plenty of potential. A few cosmetic updates, a few changes to the landscaping out front and she would be perfect! Our thinking at the time was: 1) holy crap we’ve never spent this much money in our lives and 2) at least it has the bones we want, we can always remodel over time. We found the MVP house and we went for it, warts and all. 

    Prioritization as a Product manager is constantly a balancing act between a "good enough" MVP and a “fully finished” product. Where on this spectrum you guide your product team can determine how successful your next release is and house shopping helped me find where to fall on this line.

When most people shop for houses, they make sure a house has the basic amenities they want before weighing the aesthetics. Nobody said “I know we said we wanted 3 bedrooms and this house only has 1 but it’s reeeeeeally pretty.” If your business is evaluating new software tools for HR, are they more likely to reject a vendor because the software is missing functional feature requirements or because they don’t like the way it looks? 

Release prioritization

       Releases in the enterprise world aren’t usually as fluid in scope as they are in a B2C or SMB environment. Large companies want to know what is coming up so they can prepare their infrastructure, plan trainings for their teams and make sure their feature requests are being built. Consequently, you don’t have as much flexibility in what features must be in a release.

So with scope pretty well defined, as you work towards your next release, there’s two approaches you can take to how you prioritize work for your teams as a Product manager. 

Option 1: Close it and move on

  • Build a feature to completeness with a clean UI, all the edge cases covered.

    • Close out all of the work for a feature before starting on the next one.

Option 2: Take a first pass at every feature

  • Build a basic attempt at each feature and move on to the next one before you put polish on anything

    1. Don't close out work on any feature until every feature you want to release has a first pass built.

    As humans, each with our own little bit of OCD, Option 1 feels better to us because we get a sense of closure and we can move on to the next feature. But this can be a costly mistake. If your product isn't useful until 10 specific features are supported and you only complete 8 because you spent too much time fiddling with minutia, you've let down your customers and haven't met the most basic requirements of your users. 

    Instead, Option 2, what I call the First pass approach, ensures you have at least the bare minimum for every feature before you go back and make anything fully polished. In other words, opt for the 3 bedroom house that needs some remodeling work instead of the finished 2 bed because at least everyone has a place to sleep. Then, with whatever time is left before release day, you can iterate and improve on what you already have in place; remodeling a bedroom is always cheaper than building one from scratch. 

    The First pass approach helps build protection into your process to ensure form follows function and that your teams are spending time where it is most important: making sure you don’t have a half-functional product when it comes time to release. 

    Now this certainly won’t be a popular approach with, well pretty much all of your stakeholders, but people hire Product managers to make the tough prioritization decisions so saddle up! 

  • Design teams won’t like it because instead of building the charming suburban bungalow they designed, you’ve built a cinderblock box with a single window. 

  • Executives won’t like it because you’ve fudged the definition of done and you can’t tell them when it will be “move in ready” for customers. 

  • Sales teams won’t like it because you can’t give them screenshots of what the interior will look like since that depends on how much time you have to remodel.

Take it to the Next level

    The First pass approach isn’t a new idea, but teams often don’t take it far enough and still get stuck in the trap of “just putting a few tweaks on it now to clean it up.” This is where you pull the fire alarm and evacuate the building. It goes against our nature to leave something half-finished and that is the most critical part of this idea. You must move on from a feature once it is minimally functional and start on the next one. This is a tough pill to swallow and feels like mixing up a batch of cookies but never putting them in the oven. And every day you come into the kitchen, and see sheets and sheets of cookie trays sitting around you, almost done but not quite there. The good news is people still buy cookie dough, sure you can sell fresh, warm and gooey cookies for more, but at least you have something to sell, even if it isn’t fully-baked.

    Many people I've talked to resist this approach because it feels so unnatural and they are concerned about the realities of remembering to go back and tidy up this trail of almost-completed features streaming behind you. Logging items wherever your work is tracked can help mitigate these concerns or something as simple as a note called “Release cleanup” will do in a pinch. Either way, writing it down puts your mind at ease and frees up other space in your brain for more pressing matters, like encouraging your team to move on to the next feature.

It comes with other perks too

    An interesting side effect from this strategy is an improvement in team morale as they build momentum and begin to see a working feature set or application come together. Without burning a lot of time on styling and perfecting, the pieces of the puzzle will come together faster. We have all been trapped in the slog of the nitty gritty details with features that seem to drag on forever and you can feel the momentum being sucked out of the team. The First pass approach keeps the team moving on to new things and that novelty is exciting for our brains. Even when you return to add a little polish to a feature you built a couple weeks go, it still feels new to the team because they've been working on other features in the meantime. While often overlooked, these mental victories can help build your teams’ sense of pride in what they are building and also strengthen their investment in the product which will come in handy when it’s down to the wire for release day. 

    At the end of the day, it is on the product managers to make sure that our product meets at least the basic needs of our users come release day. Maybe it won’t have stainless steel appliances and it might still have Grandma’s pink floral wallpaper in the bedroom, but at least everyone has a place to sleep. You can always remodel, iterate and improve. Take a first pass and move on.

Happy house hunting!