Many of us have worked in companies that prioritize work on an annual basis. In these organizations, it’s common to invest in a few things each year at the expense of everything else. “This is the year of search,” you might say, because “last year was the year of mobile.” On the surface, this makes total sense – you can’t make big investments in the same capabilities each year. Eventually, everything will have its day in the sun.
In reality, this is a terrible way of prioritizing work, completely ineffective, because it means that – until each program has its day in the sun – it’s essentially left to wither and die. Or to almost die, which is even worse. Don’t you see it? Look there in the corner – there’s site search, begging to be put out of its misery. It had its last big investment two years ago. It knows it’ll be the golden child again next year, but in the meantime, customers are mocking its uselessness, laughing at its broken experience. Poor thing.
A few years ago, my company addressed this by implementing an Agile, product-focused approach. Within our organization, each product area receives some amount of ongoing funding, which allows the team to make consistent progress throughout the year. The amount of funding may change according to business needs, but the idea of making consistent progress across the business doesn’t.
Take the Search product for example. Several years ago, Search had its day in the sun. Replacing our old system was one of the company’s top priorities, and the project got all the people and money it needed to be successful. Once our new Search was implemented, the big project was over, but the need to make continual progress – to optimize the experience – was still there. (It will always be there.) So although the Search team got smaller and some resources were moved to new strategic priorities, the capability continued to exist – we continued to make it better.
Search is, of course, just one example of a large company initiative – a shiny object – that needs ongoing care and feeding. (I can’t think of a product that doesn’t.) Organizations built on a product management model get this. Before they build new functionality, they’re thinking about how to support it and what the long-term roadmap looks like. Organizations that are entirely project focused, on the other hand, are likely to face poor support and unexpected costs. That’s because they haven’t planned for the inevitable, and because rust never sleeps.
Lee Zukor 