kHUB All Member Forum

Investment backlogs can be associated with virtual P&L centers comprised of cross-functional product teams that plan potentially deployable software increments to maximize WSJF. The smaller the increment, the shorter the cycle time, and the higher the WSJF. Scope creep? Backlog priority goes down as cycle time increases unless the requested functionality can be justified with a higher income forecast. Finally, a financial consequence for demanding new features that add little or no value. It’s now a different conversation with your business stakeholders. The Minimum Marketable Feature Set (MMFS) emerges because of the incentive to minimize development cycle time.

You can establish innovative virtual product teams formed around financial value without having to reorganize. Teams are no longer taking feature orders. They are creating business value. Managing to WSJF gives the business that financial predictability they have always been after. Teams can vary feature content and functionality as long as financial targets are met. And software productivity now accounts for the value side, instead of focusing on widgets per hour.

Teams plan for Investments to be released independently to maximize WSJF because cycle time includes deployment time in this model. Releases of bundled Investments are discouraged. In most cases, companies are still defining releases first and then stuffing them with features, despite adopting Agile development. I realized that if we continue to start planning with release assumptions, large releases will always exist, constraining the value of Agile development. Plan value, and view releases as a problem to solve. In fact, you can now calculate the opportunity costs of releases – the total cost of delay of completed Investments waiting for release. I call it the “Cost of not being Agile.”

Technical debt? It never got the respect from the business anticipated by calling it a “debt.” Surely, the business will want to retire debt! It doesn’t work that way. The business determines what to build next by where they get the greatest return on their investment. Now Technical debt Investments can be associated with income so they can be prioritized against business Investments based on WSJF. Turns out that it’s difficult to justify technical debt retirement based on efficiency improvement. Retire technical debt that reduces cycle time to reduce the total CoD of your Investment backlog. You can equate technical debt reduction with future income that the business understands.

Don Reinertsen’s Construx software leadership summit talk was the start of my journey. There were lots of details to work out, like how to practically calculate CoD for the typical S-curve income profile. And, how to establish income targets for the business based on target payback periods. I reviewed my methods with Construx clients over the years to ensure that WSJF prioritization is practical. My background as a VP of product management and CEO enabled me to relate the principles to business planning frameworks. The result is my recently published book, Unleashing Agile’s Missed Potential.

Now I’m on a mission to replace feature-level waterfall planning with Agile Investment Planning to enable Agile development the way it was conceived – empowered teams given the time to build software that delights customers. In waterfall development, under fixed schedules and content, we ended up building what customers would finally accept. Agile has the potential to deliver value beyond what customers can imagine.