Product Development Life Cycle - The Risk of Building the Wrong Stuff
By Tristan Kromer · Product Development Life Cycle
In a lean business model, we need to manage our risks. We sound very intelligent when we do this, but it occasionally leads to incredibly stupid behavior. For example, we might insist on stealth mode development so that the risk of a competitor stealing our super special sauce is mitigated. But here’s how the folks at LUXr represents the Time Spent Building Stuff vs. the Risk of Building the Wrong Stuff:
Building the Wrong Stuff
Of course, if we build the wrong thing we get the joy of going back to the start. And since the only point at which we realize we built the wrong thing is at the end of our super long product development life cycle and PR blitzkrieg launch, we’re kind of screwed at that point. Contrast that with working in…
Small Iterations
We can still build the wrong thing, but in this case, we only need to revert a little bit of code and/or marketing before we can proceed in the right direction. So our project never accumulates too much business risk.
Hyperbolic Risk
You may object that even if you work in one year long waterfall development cycle, you’ll only make some small errors and in that case, you can just go back a little bit and fix that one small problem. Then there wouldn’t be that much risk, right? Just like the small iterations. you’d just need to tweak your product. Without getting into the deep technical reasons why this is going to be completely impossible if you’ve made a fundamental architectural error, let’s just look at it from an experimental point of view. How do you know which part of your product is screwing up the user experience? Do your users want more buttons and widgets? Do they want less? Does widget A plus button B make a bad user experience but both together are confusing? Put another way,
But even worse, The risk in our long development cycle looks suspiciously like this:
The actual risk may approach infinity as we compound the risk of building the wrong thing, the risk of being unable to debug the user experience, the risk of running out of funds, and the risk of feature creep.
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