Remember when we thought software was “free”?

We know better now. So many highly talented engineers are working on “KTLO” projects or migrations projects that take months (or years) to complete. Many are under pressure, wrangling poorly implemented legacy code, to implement new features that may or may not be used. Often in an attempt to create incremental value for a mature product.

The data has been around a while now - More than 60% of code in production is rarely or never used. Agile’s promise of “maximizing the work not done” to avoid this scenarios has failed. "Build the Right Thing" had always been an equal partner of the Agile approach, but this message got lost. Currently, in most mid to large sized organizations, engineering is funded like an outsourced service and Scrum or Scaled Agile practices that focus on output have now been adopted. Is this output going to create success, or torture future efforts to "Build the Thing Right?"

It’s time to re-focus and bring Build the Right Thing back. Relying on a backlog that is ranked by a magical “priority” by some mythical ”Product Owner” has led to backlogs filled with technical tasks. We don't know if what we implement will be used and form engineering teams that are wholly disconnected from strategic or product goals. We push code, and push more code. When we finally integrate and release, we quickly move on. This is not sustainable.

The drive to hire more engineers, increase velocity, and implement more Project Management will only make the drive to output more severe and that in turn will ruin our customer experiences and employees satisfaction.. We don’t need more unused code to maintain ….we need to enable Product Thinking and gain confidence that we are Building the Right Thing in the first place.

The industry has undervalued Experimentation, Discovery, and Design Thinking a decade now- but there is a growing realization that building more is not the answer. Let’s start Product Thinking before weight of unused code crushes us. Every risk is an opportunity. Your biggest opportunity is #productthinking #engineering #discovery #designthinking #agile