In the time to come, I will be serving as Transformation Coach and be helping Lorenz Life Sciences on their way to become a top-notch product organization. I will share my thoughts and observations and hope you may be interested in the journey. One issue we want to get a grip on:
Mitigating risk in product development
Those who know Agile Software Development may have heard the term „Shift Left“ in testing and QA. It means that you want to push all bugs and testing as far left in the production cycle as possible. This is done in order to detect problems and bugs at the earliest moment possible, ideally right during development, rather than later when the user is having his first contact with your newest software release.
Shift Left can save a lot of money: The „Rule Of Ten“ claims that every bug becomes 10x more expensive when discovered later in the development process. So, a simple bug that might cost 10€ to fix during development may cost 100€ to fix during integration testing and 1000€ to fix during user acceptance testing.
In a similar manner, it is the goal of modern product development to understand and mitigate the risks in the development of new products or features as early as possible, way before any code has been written.
The risks a good product team has to evaluate are:
Value risk
(Whether your idea is of real worth to the customer)
Risk in usability
(Whether it „works“ for the customer)
Feasibility risk
(Whether it’s technically possible)
Business viability risk
(Whether it makes sense for your company to pursue the idea from a financial or business perspective)
The journey towards a modern product organisation will include using methods to evaluate product ideas early and find caveats as early as possible, before any serious money has been spent.
I’ll keep you updated on how we address these risks and how we ensure to tackle these risks early.
(Product risks according to Marty Cagan, from the 2nd edition of his great book Inspired)