Early on a journey prioritise learning for greater impact over the long-term

What to prioritise early in the journey towards achieving an ambitious goal

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In earlier posts I have shared the idea that it is the long-term average pace you are moving at which matters. If you know are tackling an ambitious goal and are in it for the long run, then it makes sense to invest in things which will improve your long-term average pace.

It’s common for agile teams to prioritise their tooling early. This improves their ability to ship software and the frequency they deploy. This is an example of the choice I am describing. There are many such opportunities.

For example, often there are choices to be made on which groups of users and needs to focus on first. It is common to focus on highest value first and often that is the best choice. It is worthwhile to consider the most valuable opportunities and also consider how each might impact learning which may positively impact the pace of your development.

For instance, there may be assumptions which get tested more quickly in one area but maybe not where you hypothesise the most impact lies. I recommend weighting both the presumed impact and the presumed learning such that you are not contriving ‘busy work’. Where there are many opportunities of similar value, the potential learning, especially learning that could improve your pace, learning could be a differentiating rationale for prioritisation.

Some opportunities are high impact but the difficulty of unlocking those opportunities is much higher. The presumed effort is likely already a variable you consider in your approach to prioritisation. It can be short termism to always select lower effort options. There are two approaches to addressing this you can take. The first is to break these opportunities down to smaller slices of value which would be meaningful value in their own right.

The other is to find opportunities which provide the right types of learning to reduce the effort for these opportunities. Improving your pace could help you reach the other higher impact opportunities sooner if it helps you improve your pace sooner.

So, what types of learning could improve your pace? Here are some examples:

• Learning what is required to deliver more efficiently to the beneficiaries of higher impact opportunities. For instance, building trust by delivering other value important to them which can be done at lower risk and within a shorter timeframe to build the trust and confidence before tackling more challenging opportunities.

• Focusing on early adopter types of users before tackling groups of users who are more likely to be laggards.

• Delivering value which quickly validates deployment mechanisms, release mechanisms or other repeated aspects which will quickly validate aspects that will be part of delivering higher impact work in the future.

There are many types of learning which could fit this pattern. I often like to map out our assumptions of what we believe is driving our pace. This can help you discover what these opportunities may be. Anything which may contribute to your pace is worthwhile considering as a potential factor to consider when you are prioritising or sequencing where you will expend your effort.

It’s important to measure the elements which you believe make up your pace. It might be factors such as:

• The frequency you deploy.

• The rate you deploy successfully.

• The lead time for delivering changes that positively impact your users.

• How quickly you can recover from issues if and when they occur.

• The satisfaction among users for the changes you are delivering them.

• The reach you are achieving with your users. E.g., what proportion of your intended audience have you been able to reach?

You use this as feedback to assess what is working in favour of your pace. What is your current pace? What could it be? How well are your efforts to improve succeeding in lifting the pace you deliver the impact you are seeking?

Have you made improvements to the pace your team could improve the pace value was being achieved? What are some examples? Chime in, in the comments section.