Has your team ever found itself turbulently making decisions on the fly around a particular piece of work? Mine did recently.
My team owns an application that contains a five page questionnaire. The last page on this questionnaire had a much lower completion rate than the others. After some research, we discovered people were getting hung up on one question in particular. Well, that isn't completely true. This one question can lead to six or seven additional questions depending on how the customer answers. Furthermore, these potential questions are not immediately known by many of our customers. So if the customer didn't know the question, they would quit and bounce so close to being done!
"Wonderful," we thought, "this is a clearly defined problem that we can impact." So we did what a good product squad would do. We defined the problem, researched what we actually needed on the page, decomposed it into smaller pieces that still deliver customer value, and committed to the work. As it turns out many of those questions we were asking were not needed for most people. In fact, only certain people from Kentucky needed to answer everything we were asking! Sorry, Kentucky.
The first piece of work was to stop asking people questions that we didn't need to know. The second was to redesign how we were asking the question(s).
The first piece was delivered, and it was a success! More people are completing that page, and the completion rate is similar to the other pages if not better. We then started working on the next piece, redesigning the page to allow for a better UX.
As I was working on the redesign, I realized the redesign as it stood was technically infeasible. I went to my designer, and we came up with another solution. We were going to make a brand new page just for this one question! I kept working on it, but since we were doing work other than what we decomposed, I had to keep going back to my designer for clarity. The scope of the work kept growing until we had it in an acceptable state. It was at that point we realized that this work is much more than what we originally set out to do and carried much more risk than what we committed to. We made several mistakes that I hope you can see in reading that story.
1. We committed to work that could have been unneeded.
Both the first and second pieces of work were committed to at the same time. We never bothered to ask if the first piece is all that is necessary. Furthermore, we never stopped to see if that first thin slice actually had the impact we wanted before starting the second piece.
2. After the design was created, we never decomposed the engineering work needed to build it.
Two of our engineers never saw the redesign of the page before I started working on it. Had they seen it, they would've been able to point out that the design was technically infeasible before I started working on it.
3. Once I discovered it was infeasible, I went to one person on the team only.
I went straight to our designer to point out the problem in the design and ask for new direction. The thing is, at that very moment the ticket was defunct. What we committed to was no longer a possibility, and if we were to continue, we needed to come up with a new plan as a team.
Fortunately, we eventually realized the huge risk in the new redesign before we shipped it to customers. We took a step back, saw that the first piece of work accomplished our goal all on its own, and aborted the second piece of work. Unfortunately, the redesign was all but done. I had just spent 3-4 days working on it, and engineering time is not cheap.
What should have been done instead?
The second piece of work should have never been committed to. Since it was contingent on the first piece, we couldn't really know what was involved in it therefore making it unable to be committed to. If the second piece of work had been decomposed at the appropriate time, other engineers could have seen the infeasible design and called it into question way earlier. Had we had done that, much time could have been saved, but let's say that we didn't do that. There still was another point where we could have turned around, when I realized it was infeasible to build.
So, if you ever find yourself in a position where the work you are doing takes a drastic turn from the work that your team committed to do, come back to the table, figure out what needs to be done with the team, and recommit to the solution.