“Are You Crazy?!” – Project vs Product Focus

eco-data, larry apke, agile doctor, product focus

When You Have A Project Focus

Coach: If we take some time to learn and adopt excellent software development practices like BDD/TDD, CI and refactor some our code to remove some technical debt, we will be able to development higher quality software and deliver it to our customers faster.

Project Manager: Are you crazy?! We are already behind schedule! We cannot take on anymore work. This would increase our risk of delivering desired functionality!

Coach: But fixing some of these issues will allow the team to create better code and reduce the cost of delivering in the future.

Project Manager: Future. I am concerned with the delivery next quarter. After this project is completed, we transfer the code to the maintenance team. Let them do this work, I don’t want it charged to my project. Besides, the development team on this project will be disbanded at the end of the project.

Coach: Are you crazy?! Disbanding the team? All the progress we have made as a team is lost as soon as you disband the team. You cannot build a quality product when you keep shuffling teams! Keep them together and bring the work to them.

Project Manager: How much are we paying you? We need to save some money.

When You Have A Product Focus

Coach: If we take some time to learn and adopt excellent software development practices like BDD/TDD, CI and refactor some our code to remove some technical debt, we will be able to development higher quality software and deliver it to our customers faster.

Product Owner: That sounds awesome! I will work together with the team to understand the long term return on investment of doing these things, we will create some stories to handle this work and prioritize appropriately.

See what I mean?

Larry Apke

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