Regular Product Increment

I AM OLD—IGNORE ME Regular Product Increment

….creating products is a complex and challenging activity. With a multiplicity of activities required to develop even the most basic piece of work, how can progress be accurately measured?

✥ ✥ ✥

As there is no one clear way to develop a new product it is extremely challenging to develop a useful measure of development progress.

As organizations grow the urge to keep the internal workings easy to understand creates many locally optimized work practices. For example silos create and reward specialization that reinforce individuals to think of how to optimize their own work, rather than the work of their team or organization. As specialists from several silos may be required in product development, measuring progress of this specialist work does not give an accurate description of the state of the product.

Modern organizations are often filled with debt left from previous delivery activities, where corners were cut due to time constraints or lack of appropriate quality measures. This makes progress on new products or enhancements of old very challenging, and progress difficult to measure.

Individuals in the organization will demonstrate the actual values of the organization (in contrast with the espoused values) through their local work practices. Having individual performance measures that reinforce local silo based behaviors will force the measurement of progress for development within these silos.

Therefore: To have an accurate measure of progress in this complex environment a product increment must be regularly developed in a short time box. This regular product increment will include as many of the highest priority product backlog items that can be "Done" in the time box.

✥ ✥ ✥

The delivery of a regular product increment will give an accurate measure of progress on product development as this requires all the work need to develop the product to be completed for a small component of product.

Linked patterns:

• Definition of Done

• Cross functional team

• Product Backlog

• Sprint

• ROI

• Single piece continuous flow

Author: Lachlan Heasman