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Build What’s Next: Digital Product Perspectives
The process of developing digital products and experiences can be a daunting task organizations often find themselves wondering if they are solving the right problems the right way hoping the result is what the end user needs. That’s why our team at Method has decided to launch Build What’s Next: Digital Product Perspectives.
Every week, we’ll explore ways to connect technology with humanity for a simpler digital future. Together, we’ll examine digital products and experiences, strategic design and product development strategies to help us challenge our ideas and move forward.
Build What’s Next: Digital Product Perspectives
Planning for What's Next with AI: A Deep Dive into Strategic Decision-Making
In this podcast episode, Jason Rome and David Brown discuss the critical aspects of planning within organizations, emphasizing the importance of effective decision-making, alignment, and capacity planning. They explore the challenges teams face during planning sessions, the significance of prioritization frameworks, and the need for a balanced approach to managing initiatives. The conversation also touches on the role of AI in enhancing planning processes and the necessity of measuring actual performance against expectations.
Episode Resources:
Jason Rome on LinkedIn: /jason-rome-275b2014/
David Brown on LinkedIn: /david-allen-brown/
Method Website: method.com
Welcome back to another podcast of Build what's Next. I'm Jason Rome, your host head of digital solutions at Method, and I've got David Brown back with me today, our guest from, I believe, our second most popular podcast last year, and so we are here trying to top that and be number one for 2025 is the goal today. So lots of wisdom, lots of nuggets of insight and, mostly, your LinkedIn network of all the people that like you that we can send this to. So how are you doing Good, good, what's either the best book you're reading or the best book you have read recently? I didn't tell him this question was coming, so this was my surprise starter question.
Speaker 2:I've enjoyed. We briefly texted about this, but the Dungeon Crawler Coral series to the point where it's a very long series and I want to go back and just reread it did you finish it? Yes, I binged it.
Speaker 1:It's very bingeable, so that's the nerdiest thing we will. It's a nerdy podcast. I don't want to. I don't want to set a bar that we might not top later, but any, any, any work related books that you've enjoyed this year.
Speaker 2:I've been going and rereading a bunch of old ones to be honest with you, just because a lot of times who I'm working with and what maybe frameworks they're using but one that I've cracked back open is the what is it? The Value Flywheel? I'm butchering it right now. It's by David Anderson. It's how to use wordly mapping in a new modern cloud.
Speaker 1:We immediately got nerdier.
Speaker 2:I know.
Speaker 1:We went from a dungeon crawler crawl to wordly mapping, so we've already lost 97% of the audience today. So we're making great progress. We'll make up. What about you?
Speaker 1:You know I'm reading Leading Change, john Cotter right now and just really enjoying it.
Speaker 1:I think one of the most recent ones that I've really enjoyed I'll butcher this one, I think it's one I recommended as well was focus on how big things happen, like how big projects happen, and so a pretty large longitudinal study across different spaces on succeeding in major, large initiatives and not overestimating them and hitting them on time and like what leads to that.
Speaker 1:And you know, I think in in today, you know the focus the last couple years on on agile and um and product. I think program management and project management has been a little bit of a lost art if I weave these two books together um and just the, I think in a in a world where people are thinking about ai and going faster and faster, playing the long game and thinking about the long game and planning for the long game is probably one of the biggest struggles I see for teams right now and bringing that together. So I think both of those books are just really good reminders and kind of focusing on the cultural side and the people side and this world of excitement on AI. So yeah, I think those are some good ones.
Speaker 2:Those are good ones.
Speaker 1:But jumping into our topic today, you know I had a couple coffees recently and we went deep into planning. We're recording this the end of July here, and it's everyone's favorite time of the year annual planning, annual budgeting where you know everyone has to do their day job and on top of that they have to work on a budget for a year of things they're not sure how they're going to do or when they're going to do them and what it looks like, but we've got to make the best of it. And so I think a really fascinating topic for people. I think one that's really fun to talk about for me, because I find watching a team do any sort of planning, whether it's annual planning or increment planning or sprint planning is a great way to uncover almost what any one of their issues are in the company, and so you can figure out hey, culture's a little off here, the way people are talking to each other. Hey, there's a lot of strategic uncertainty. People aren't aligned on the strategy vision Like. Hey, there's not good business metrics. Hey, people don't understand their capacity and carryover work. Hey, delivery is not going smooth.
Speaker 1:So I think planning is just a really fun topic. I think it's something that you know everyone struggles with and I think, as companies are bringing in more AI as well and they want to be able to go faster, the importance of really good planning process and making sure the right resources, the right capacity, the right dependencies go to the right places is going to be more key than ever. So you know, I know you've been doing some thinking around planning. When you think of planning and good planning specifically, what are you looking for in an organization? You know, if you were a fly on the wall of annual planning, you know, pick your cadence like what's good, look like to you.
Speaker 2:It's a fun one, and I think where I've seen the most success is just looking at the faces as people come into that big room and how many people are dreading it versus. You may see some excitement. There are a few organizations that have made planning fun. I mean it's we're not talking about virtual.
Speaker 1:Right, right. Well, virtual, only Virtual Trust Falls. I like that. Virtual is a good band name. There you go, there you go.
Speaker 2:But yeah, it is a window into the culture of the organization. There are many cultures within an organization, especially large ones, but what is the sentiment? What are people going in? Do they feel like they're going to accomplish something or are they dreading that thing? And it's the hard conversations they're not prepared for because they have been busy with their day job. So I think that's the first tell. Do they believe that this planning event if it's a big one or let's say it's more of a continuous planning is it going to feed their work and help them out, or is it going to hurt them?
Speaker 1:Yeah, what, uh when? Uh, what are people dreading, like you mentioned? Dread like, is it? Oh, my thing's not going to be funded. Oh, this is not going to be a good use of my time. You know it could be multiple things, but what's the, is it? Hey, I've got a million other things I should be doing right now. What are people dreading?
Speaker 2:I think it is a lot of different things. Ones that stick out to me is the person's not prepared to go talk about the thing that they're going to get questions about, or they've been so busy focusing on wrapping up the last thing they're not prepared for this one. Or it's a type of planning that's not all inclusive, and so they're going to be asked questions when maybe they don't have the right team members there, or they're showing up to represent something that maybe they're not excited to represent.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm going to pull up something because you and I had this conversation a couple of weeks ago and maybe we can explore some of these topics and things teams can do and what they can do. But I really like this concept that. You know, planning is decision making and I think one of the things I've seen an anti-pattern, you know, if I walk into you know, a lot of companies do some kind of big room planning or PI planning on a quarterly basis and there's ones that actually feel like planning and it feels strategic and having conversations about trade-offs, and then there's versions of it that feel like a three-day backlog, grooming with a hundred people on the call, and and 95% of those people are multitasking and like waiting for their turn. Um, so so when I think about planning you know the, the five things for me, you know that I look for is is alignment. You know, as a, as a initiative or something comes to the table, is there a shared view of why we're doing this and what we're doing Like? Do do people agree on what the thing is or is it the elephant in the blind man Right? Um, prioritization, which, which we'll get into? Um, what is most important? Do we have alignment on that? Can we, can we make those trade-off decisions? Sequencing what order should we do those things?
Speaker 1:I find a lot of organizations that have this concept of pivots like what are we looking for that would make us change course, and when do we change course? Do we have the ability to change course? Stop pursuing bad work, start something new. I'll let you talk about finishing versus starting work, which I know is a passion topic for you. And then, finally, actions like coming out of planning. Is there a really clear roster of next steps? I think that's one thing for me. Coming out of quarterly planning events. Teams are so focused on the next three sprints band up in this repeated cycle of just not being ready for the next plan because they didn't. They're not able to look two quarters ahead, and then, when it comes to annual planning, and suddenly you have to look four quarters ahead. It's really painful. So you know, I'd be curious in a planning setting of some of these key decisions alignment, prioritization, sequencing, pivots taking actions like which do you find is the hardest in the toolkit that a lot of people have today, and why is that hard for teams going?
Speaker 2:there's a few things to call out here. One alignment has to be maintained. No one says, hey, we're aligned and then we don't have to reinvest in that ever again. It's continuous, almost like planning. Is I like your framing around? Planning is decision-making and I think to even go back and incorporate the first question where is it? Have it well or not well is are we planning something we can actually decide on, or are these just continued efforts that are just persistent from the last planning event and the last planning event? And when are things going to get done? You highlighted that's something I'm passionate about, but I think if I can just look at a room or a big event and ask the question, does any of this matter? Or are we going to come out of here and say these things that we came in with are just going to continue on and nothing's going to change? Why did we do this planning?
Speaker 1:so like yeah, or are we going to change our default? Because, because there, I guess, because there's a couple things there there is is there a decision actually to be made versus the default hypothesis? But how much there? Are you also touching on like carryover work or like aspects maybe of like proper decomposition of is the thing? Is the milestone scoped right in the first place, like, is there a done for the things that we're doing? Like, open that up a little bit more for me. I think there is that there.
Speaker 2:The one other item that might happen is has it already been decided for us what we're going to do and how we're going to do it? If that's already been decided for us, what are we doing in this room? Let's do it. Let's just go do it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's one of the big things for me, that, especially when it comes to prioritization, right and product folks and teams love their prioritization framework. And I think one of the big anti-patterns for me is, you know, people expect the prioritization framework to spit out the answer versus inform the answer. And what I've seen is, unless you're super mature on metrics like even if you are, there's always going to be unknowns, there's always going to be risks and humans are going to have to make that decision and take that risk. You know, a lot of time every prioritization framework is just a aggregate of subjective features masquerading as the subjective framework, especially WizGIF, you know, I see you WizGIF, and so I think that that's one of the things I see is teams not able to figure out like what is that decision we're actually trying to make, like what is that trade-off that we're trying to do in that planning and how to do that. But to your point, you know, that's why one of the things I like to have things people do is look at initiatives or work in terms of three categories. One is, hey, foundational work. We don't have a choice, and I'll let you talk about the, you know, tying this back to the four business metrics that you like to use. But hey, we don't have a choice to do this, let's go do it. We don't need to make a business case Like it's regulatory, it's compliance. It's the latest version of React, it's a security vulnerability. Let's just work it in and figure out what has to be done by.
Speaker 1:There's table stakes, stuff of which is more reducing downside risk of hey, if we don't do this, probably a bad thing happens versus a good thing happens from this. And I think that's one of the weaknesses of a lot of prioritization frameworks is they're always looking for upside versus limiting downside. Um, and so they. It can be tough for those things to be prioritized, but there's a lot of just, I would say, in customer experience. A lot of good customer experience is just meeting expectations and not being bad and it's not exciting. And then there's your stuff that hey, and this is an upside case, and the way you and I've talked about this in the past is when you're making that upside case, that's where there's usually your greatest variability on what you could spend and what you could expect as an outcome. And those are the ones that we really have to rationalize. We probably have to do some discovery work but talked about talk about you know, black swan farming and CD3 and like how you help teams think through and map that work.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'll lead into that. So one of the things you talked about is prioritization and prioritization frameworks and I always ask, like, what are we buying with a prioritization framework? It should be reducing cognitive load for things that we shouldn't be spending time on. So what are the easy answers? That should be streamlined. Your framework should have answered that, but it doesn't mean it removes all thinking. It's just where do you get to allocate your thinking? Because the easy stuff was taken care of, so almost like automate what you can, your thinking because the easy stuff was taken care of. So almost like automate what you can.
Speaker 2:I do a lot like what, and I don't know what's original origins, but I found it on the blog for Black Swan Farming, but it's four types of value. It's protect revenue or increase revenue or profits excuse me protect profits or improve profits and then reduce costs or avoid costs. And a lot of times, when you introduce this into whether it's your business case or just some sort of lens to say what is this initiative doing and why do you believe it's important to the organization? It either checks one or multiple of those boxes, or you can split the initiative into percentages and say if we are successful with this because it's a big hypothesis. These are the areas in which it provides value, or the type of value for the organization. When you do that, times 30, 50 items in a big portfolio, you are able to step back and say where are we, where's all our investment going? And if you keep just checking one or two boxes, you have the ability to rationalize. Is that right or do we need a better form of balance?
Speaker 1:You've done that at a couple of places you've worked with Like, if you can share a story or two of like after that, what was the behavior change you saw when people started and I love the word portfolio because I think really good product managers think like a portfolio manager of where am I placing my bets, where am I making investments, but talk about share a story or two of of the when the light bulb maybe came on for executives or teams.
Speaker 2:Yeah, two of the two of the times that come front of mind is one our cybersecurity leader couldn't get anything through. It could have been because of you know the language they were using.
Speaker 2:How were they trying to sell it? Who they were speaking to the time in the organization. It could have been a lot of different things, but what really helped is when we started using that categorization and saying, hey, we don't have a lot of things in our portfolio. That is checking this box of protecting revenue, and so what is that? If we were to look at that box altogether, what are the items that are on the board that might be considered? And it started to create space to say, hey, maybe we start to do some of the things that we've been putting off for years and our cybersecurity leader has been advocating for a very long time. Other ones is, I want to say, prioritization was hiding behind certain words, like the word compliance. Meaning, hey, this is a compliance thing, we have to do it. Meaning, hey, this is a compliance thing, we have to do it. And it allowed us to dig a little bit deeper and say, all right, what are the real concerns here?
Speaker 1:It can't happen if we are non-compliant, and we know that Right.
Speaker 2:And then, because of that line of questioning, it asked other questions like can we ask for an extension? I don't know if that was ever asked before. And then they were oh yeah, we can ask for it. So we got two more years out of it. So we didn't have to do it that quarter, and because we got to put that off, we got to reallocate where people spent their time on things that were probably a little bit more important right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, and you know. So a question there. You know, when you're rolling that out or helping teams, do you go through all the initiatives and then give people a view of like, hey, this is how your portfolio is laid out, is this how you expected? Or do you make them do like, before they go through and see that like, how do you hope your portfolio is laid out and show them kind of what you think versus what it is Like? How do you set people up to have that conversation?
Speaker 2:Well, a couple of different ways. I think the latter is probably one of the best ways is what do you think it will be and what do you forecast forecast for? And then they get to kind of almost see the actual, the output from planning. And especially if you're running a big planning that's multi-day, at the end of day one, like get a check-in and where is it red, where's it blue? Whatever scheme you're using, and is that what you had expected? Two things can happen there. Their forecasts are widely off. They shouldn't have forecasted that way. Most sometimes you're new to the organization, you're new in the role or you inherited a portfolio. Sometimes that's fine, you're allowed to be off. But let's talk through that. At least give it a little bit of space for conversation. Or I don't know where the order was going.
Speaker 1:Actually we'll. We'll find it. It's out in the river somewhere float. I mean, I threw it out of the boat, um, so, uh, yeah, I guess with that. And so you know I love that.
Speaker 1:I do the same thing, you know, sometimes with with a lot of my clients, and this is why planning so great, because it it ties back to like how well aligned are you on your strategy and where should you be placing bets. I facilitated a workshop late last year with a team that was kind of thinking about how they do planning and I asked one of the leaders on the product side. I said you know, hey, between investing in new features and innovating versus modernizing, and paying down tech debt versus running the business, you know what are those percentages? And she articulated. She said, you know, I really think most of what we have to do is fixing what we have and only 20% is new. And with like all the leaders in the room like that was a really powerful statement for somebody to make, because then it was like okay, now we can look at what's funded and what we're working on and does that match with expectation? And we at least have a starting point for a conversation of not just what we're prioritizing, but does the prioritization spit out what makes sense for our portfolio? Because it's really hard to draw equivalencies between growing revenue, which has a lot more inherent risk, versus protecting revenue, versus managing costs and lowering costs. And yes, you can try to weight those with the questionnaires you do to build that. But I think it's more important of just where are we as a company right now? Where is our product right now? Where are we in the life cycle? Can we be really honest about that of how aggressively like, what is our growth in the market going to be tied to when it comes to product strategy, technology strategy?
Speaker 1:And without that view, without that primacy, I think going back to like what makes people dread planning is when they come into it.
Speaker 1:It feels like a fight and not a collaborative exercise where and that fight comes from silos, it comes from, you know, kind of tribalism between teams and each team thinks their initiative is the big thing or the most important thing, and it just leads to a lot of kind of downstream anti-patterns versus, hey, as we make investments as a company, do we have an alignment on where all this is going? And that's why I always, when I do that exercise, I like to do it abstracted of the number of scrum teams they might have today, like, given a hundred percent of your capacity, whatever your capacity ends up being, do you do you have a sense of how you'd like to spend that capacity, whether it's five teams, 15 teams or 30 teams? Cause I think the what I'd seen in the past is, hey, we just need a couple more teams this year. We need a couple more teams, and it's easy to keep adding and adding and adding versus rationalizing. Hey, are those other teams still working on things that are that are pretty valuable?
Speaker 1:Um, any other thoughts on kind of portfolio strategy as it comes to planning and good, maybe preconditions for what a team needs to walk into that room with to have the right conversations? And then I want to move downstream and talk about sequencing and action planning and all that I think for that last question, it, it, it almost really depends.
Speaker 2:I think that's where going in and running assessment and saying where are we at, what do we need to be able to just get one percent better helps to say that.
Speaker 1:But I did have a couple questions for you yeah, yeah, you found that award and you turned it over.
Speaker 2:But you mentioned capacity planning. That seems to be one of the hardest things to do, attached to how an organization figures out how to do capacity planning and how to integrate that into their planning, whether it's cycles or events. Where have you seen success there for organizations?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I mean I think for me a couple things. One is is having honest telemetry or intelligence around how capacity works today and how accurate we are. And so when we've planned in the past, how reliable are we? How much carryover work do we have? I was looking at some metrics the other day and like how much churn in the code do we have, which I think is a great metric that I'm excited to try out some places but like how much code has changed within three weeks that it was deployed right, and so like how much are we? Are we planning right? Are we doing the right amount of discovery or defining it right? Are we managing the quality of it? Are we having to make changes immediately? And then, looking at a quarterly plan, are we generally pretty reliable in terms of what we went into? And one of my other favorite metrics, that one of the questions I ask in my assessments is how much unplanned work flows through.
Speaker 1:Like because that that's a huge anti pattern of stuff that doesn't go through the planning process or some sort of triage process to get in. It's the classic, you know, exec calls up an engineer and says, hey, I need this thing for customer stat, that type of thing and you have to build from the bottom up, like your teams have to be able to accurately estimate, which is which is why I'm very anti weaponizing velocity as a metric for measuring teams, because it turns into a game metric. You can't accurately track burndown. I've seen a lot of companies where teams will brush carryover work under the rug and they'll just kind of squeeze it between hours, between sprints, and they just build up this kind of carryover debt under the rug. And they'll just kind of squeeze it between hours, between sprints and they just build up this kind of carryover debt. And then you know QA is the odd man out at the end of trying to harden all this stuff at once. That kind of got snuck in as a request or you end up with these just massive commits that are hard to integrate into the code base.
Speaker 1:So that's the first thing is a good culture around teams getting really good at reliable planning and that that looks at the upstream and downstream causes, metrics about that and how teams have done in the past, and then you know from there. I think when you're doing it top down, you know it touches on what you already had. So first is having an accurate view of, like the portfolio, of how do we want to be able to spend our time. And then I really love initiative boards and initiative planning and specifically and maybe we can send out a visual of this but you know, laying out those initiatives of what we want to accomplish. But then having a view, you know, if we're doing this across, you know a couple teams five, six, seven teams which of those teams are going to be impacted and how much are they going to be impacted by this as columns against those initiatives. So if my initiatives are my rows, one of my sets of my columns will be these teams are the ones that are impacted. Because then I can look, I can total those columns and say for everything we've planned, here's the impact across these teams. And that starts to suggest to me are our teams oriented right way? Do we have bottlenecks in our teams? And so I think an organization that can look at all the things they want to do, but which teams are impacted, which is also why I separate prioritization from sequencing.
Speaker 1:Prioritization is what we want to do, sequencing is what we have the ability to do and like how to do that, clustering and not just, you know, following prioritization to it, but really intelligently thinking about how work plots and how it's graphed.
Speaker 1:And then there's also being really honest around.
Speaker 1:Are we taking on too much hard stuff right now, like, are we doing a mix of some stuff that's easy, some stuff that we can fit in, some stuff that has high uncertainty, some stuff that has low uncertainty, so that it's not just like we're maximizing the story points and you know we're not giving people downtime, but I want a couple of places there, but that's probably the big three.
Speaker 1:So, good metrics, understanding you know how we use our capacity. You know teams being able to be honest about their capacity and, I think, having a culture of psychological safety where they can raise their hand and say yes or no, but then, from a top down, being able to look and cluster initiatives and see which teams they're impacting. And that's actually one of the cool AI use cases that I've seen a little bit in the market. Some teams start to use is using AI that can look at the bug backlog, it can look at the idea backlog, it can look at customer feedback, it can look at major initiatives and it can cluster themes and kind of grab all that to help teams say like, hey, this one thing isn't rising to the top, but there's a confluence around this area and being able to look at that against capacity and say, do we have capacity in this area to do that? That's how I think about it.
Speaker 2:The one thing in your point one around metrics that you said earlier about. What I highlight is like actuals there's a lot of. We lack discipline sometimes to say all right, we're going to start measuring these things, but then we won't start to pull in the actuals to say how off are we and can we use that as a mean or an average for a better forecast in the future?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and we're partnering with some folks now to from a tooling to not just look at what teams say but actually like what gets committed. So not just relying on what was in Jira, which is what's in the ticket, which really relies on a subjective estimation and then a closure date at some point. But if we can tie what's in that ticket to all right, how many lines of code was in that commit? How many bugs related to that feature? Like, how many times did it have to go through a cycle? You can get a sense of actual effort.
Speaker 1:And I think that's one of the weaknesses of a lot of organization is they still rely on where did people spend their time versus what did they accomplish, and it's so, you know, we could talk about that for days, because the ramifications on how they budget, how they think about it, how. So we could talk about that for days, because the ramifications on how they budget, how they think about it, how their finance office thinks about it, how they measure people there's just a bit of a death cycle that comes from. Like that's how we look at problems into usage by these teams, which which, by the way you know, I'm, I'm, I'm a buy on AI, but I don't think I was as strong as it's going to change everything overnight, as some people are just based on some of the early data I've seen on what the returns are. But it becomes a lot more important to think about, like how we're measuring teams and the value they drive to to through that in terms of that capacity management side. Right.
Speaker 2:That makes sense.
Speaker 1:Thank you.