Shipping the Roadmap Is the Minimum
Aviv Ben-Yosef · 3 min read “It’s a remarkable restaurant, terrific service!”
“What’s so special?”
“I ordered dinner… and they gave me exactly what I asked for!”
If that seems like the most lukewarm recommendation, you’re right. But why are you allowing yourself the same yardstick for your tech org?
The Lowered Expectations
When speaking with tech leaders about the way they measure themselves and their orgs, the answers are usually very similar. People look at the roadmap and their commitments, and success is about how much of those they actually shipped. Those doing great add “on time.”
That’s ridiculous and means you’re aiming too low. Yes, if your team is struggling to get even that done, you need to take care of it. But I’m going to assume you can do better. Here’s what earns the stars.
It’s usually not good to have your team always ship 100% of its commitments. If that happens all the time, it often means the team is sandbagging its plans to ensure it never takes on any stretch goals.
Your Real Product
Looking just at the roadmap delivered means you’re judging the product. But the truth is that your product is the team. You want to see improvements in how your organization is operating. To help you do that, do a quick year-over-year check and consider how you’re doing now compared to where you were at the beginning of the year (much easier if you’re diligently taking notes).
Team Operates Better: More than merely producing code on time, is the team as a whole working better? For example, you have fewer issues, quality is improving, and the processes are becoming more and more streamlined.
Metric suggestion: share of capacity lost to rework and firefighting.
Talent Quality Improves: You’re able to hire the right people. You’re retaining the right people. People on the team are constantly growing, improving, and getting better. You have no Peter-Pans. Those people you have are diverse enough to supply a healthy variety of approaches and opinions, and they’re not afraid to speak up.
Metric suggestions: how much unwanted attrition, time till a new hire ships value, seniority-index across the org.
Product Understanding Deepens: In a healthy tech organization, your team ought to gain more and more expertise and product mastery. Engineers should ask fewer shallow questions, get stuck less often, and bring up the right sort of objections and suggestions. With AI making us complete many tasks much faster, this has become 10x more important.
Metric suggestion: how often engineers push back on a spec to avoid useless work or come up with improvements during your planning phase.
Innovation Abounds: Lastly, you want to ensure that your organization is pushing the envelope. Experimentation and creativity are the ultimate sign of a successful, growing team. It’s how we genuinely create remarkable ROI. It’s also extremely rare, as most tech organizations are focused on their backlogs and short-term results.
Metric suggestion: Share of capacity spent on bets and experiments.
Considering these aspects and contrasting them with where you were at the beginning of the year, you can realize whether you’re really doing better or not. The stars go to the restaurant that offers something extraordinary, and in our careers we ought to aim for nothing short of that. If you want to be doing even better, let’s talk.
