With this post, I will be putting a foot in the door of Railsware blogging about productivity.
The past 1 year of company life was super crucial. We went through a mark of 5 years old – but that doesn’t really change much.What actually happened and what was a game changer for us is that we:- Became kazillion times more critical to information;
- Became kazillion times more organized;
- Thus, became kazillion * kazillion times more productive;
- Because we have boiled and created an exceptionally Great Culture inside the company.
Stories, Benefits
So we became benefit focused from the production point of view. We did so by writing more stories – which made us understand much deeper what should be done. It suddenly started to transfer the deep contextual information that is not being touched in usual task driven approach.Benefit Driven Approach
But then we were like – “hey, wait a minute – if stories turn products into better products – they should turn the company in better company”.And that one phrase gave birth to “Benefit Driven Approach” to be doing anything. We started looking at things from the benefit perspective. And thinking the other way around – “we need better sales” turned into two:- Improve our income, SO that company status is healthier, SO that we can pay our employees more, SO that they enjoy what they do, SO that they get realized.
- Do great things (product, software), SO that we can make life of people (users) better and we enjoy the greatness of the process to create better things, SO that we enjoy what we do.
Prioritization
Then we started generating lots and lots of ideas to better implement the benefit than our usual way/focus did in both products and company.So we started creating huge lists of something. This list became unmaintainable, but also there were too many parallel thoughts in the brain of one making it hard to focus.So we have taken the old but great prioritization practice – MoSCoW and injected it into everything. Now the communication became much more transparent. We were not talking about 100 items now, but 4 MUSTs, 7 SHOULDs, 21 COULDs and 68 WON’Ts.So now depending on the time/efforts constraints we were talking about 4+7=11 mostly and 4+7+21=32 sometimes – which is very maintainable.Additionally we’ve done two more things:- Never lost 68 WON’Ts.
- Marked them as WON’Ts, so that we didn’t just say what will be done – but what will be paused.