EMPOWERED

CHAPTER 74Keeping the Lights On

Most of this book is about how strong teams solve hard problems in ways that our customers love, yet work for the business.

However, it's also true that every team must do some amount of “keep‐the‐lights‐on” work.

When you're trying to run a business, you will always have certain work that is nonnegotiable if you wish to stay in business. Common examples include:

• Fixing critical bugs
• Addressing compliance issues (such as a new law relating to privacy)
• Incorporating minor changes to handle changing reporting needs
• Adding instrumentation for collecting usage analytics

None of these are glamorous, but usually they are relatively minor.

You might address these items for your own purposes (e.g., fixing critical bugs or analytics instrumentation), or you might address requests from someone like your legal officer (e.g., new compliance issue) or your finance partner (e.g., a reporting need).

The product manager is typically the person responsible for understanding these keep‐the‐lights‐on items, collecting whatever data is necessary and putting the work on the backlog. As a general rule, we don't need to do product discovery on any of these items. If we do, then we would consider it more‐normal product work.

So, how does this relate to business collaboration?

The source of these keep‐the‐lights‐on items is often one or more of our business partners. They might not know the best way to satisfy the need, but they are usually acutely aware of the need ...