The Art of Agile Development, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Discovery

Optimizing teams make their own product decisions. How do they know what to build?

Partly, they know what to build because they include people with product expertise. Those team members have the background and training to decide what to do.

But the fact is, at least at the beginning of a new product, nobody is 100% sure what to do. Some people pretend to know, but Optimizing teams don’t. Their ideas are, at best, very good guesses about what will lead to success.

So the job of the Optimizing team isn’t to know what to build, but to discover what to build. Steve Blank, whose work was the basis for the Lean Startup movement, put it this way:

[T]he task is unambiguous—learn and discover what problems customers have, and whether your product concept solves that problem; understand who will buy it; and use that knowledge to build a sales roadmap so a sales team can sell it to them. And [you] must have the agility to move with sudden and rapid shifts based on what customers have to say and the clout to reconfigure [your team] when customer feedback requires it. [Blank2020a] (app. A)

Steve Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany

Steve Blank was talking about startups, but this quote applies equally well to Optimizing teams. Even if you aren’t selling your software! No matter who your customers and users are—even if they’re Keven and Kyla, who sit in the next cubicle over—your job is to figure out how to bring them value. And, just as importantly, how to do so ...