Escaping the Build Trap

Chapter 18. Solution Exploration

I met with the team again two weeks later to review what it learned.

“We found a bigger problem standing in the way of reaching our goal,” said Christa, grinning. “Our teachers are spending upward of 80 hours over two months editing videos for their class. There are some people who are even reshooting the videos over and over again so they don’t have to edit.”

I was very proud of them. “See, trying to solve one problem uncovered a bigger one. What is the next step?” I asked.

“We’re running an experiment to see whether taking on video editing for a select group of our teachers will result in more courses being published from that group,” said Christa. The team began to walk through the Kata to determine what it needed to learn next.

“We know that video editing is a problem for most of our teachers, but we need to learn whether solving this problem will increase the published rate of courses,” said Rich.

“Perfect,” I said. “Now how do you make that happen?”

The team scoped out its experiment. They would pitch the video-editing service to the teachers and help up to 10 of them per week for two weeks. There were two video editors at Marquetly working in its marketing department. Christa asked Karen to get buy-in from the VP of marketing to have them help execute on the experiment for two weeks, and he agreed. Together, they determined that they could handle about seven courses per week together, in that amount of time.

With that in mind, and already ...