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CHAPTER 9Changing How You Decide Which Problems to Solve

So far we've talked about the need to change how you build and the need to change how you solve problems. But we haven't talked about how you decide which problems are the most important to solve.

It is not hard simply to take your existing product roadmaps and, for each feature or project, to determine what the underlying problem to solve is and what the logical way to measure success would be. That's the simple and straightforward way to move from roadmaps of features to roadmaps of outcomes. (This is referred to as an outcome-based roadmap—see the box in chapter 8.)

This is not a difficult step, and it's true that simply providing your empowered product teams with problems to solve—and clear measures of success—can go a long way toward generating significantly better solutions to those problems for your customers and your business.

But are those really the most important problems to be solved for your customers and for your company?

Every company has before it a set of opportunities and faces a set of threats.

How rigorous is your company in selecting the best opportunities to pursue and focusing on those threats that you should take seriously?

Disrupting Product Planning

In most stakeholder-driven, feature-team companies, there is some form of an annual product-planning process. Here, the stakeholders make their cases for the projects they think are most important to be done.

In many of these companies, the finance ...