How does your digital product flow?

Product leaders will recognise the challenge of maintaining flow when scaling your digital product.

What is flow you may ask?

Flow is one of the key principles of Lean and refers to the manner in which work progresses through a system, ideally this should move through in a steady and predictable way. But is this how work flows through your product development teams?

To use the analogy of a river, this is the core problem we need to address:

• Work grows and it floods out
• Everything and anything flows into the sea
• People only see the downstream they don’t see the flow and they don’t know how to deal with it along the way.

Let’s start with some basic lean principles

The solution lays with 3 key principles:

1. Understand and maintain flow
2. Identify value and use to drive flow
3. Allow teams to pull over pushing work.

Allow a team to pull requires 4 things:

They have enough work to pull - Make sure you have the backlog elaborated and refined to do this first you have dependencies… 

Have backlogs aligned to vision - teams have backlogs have already been prioritised by those leading and shaping strategy - in other words your elaborated backlog represents the high level vision and strategic goals - this is the framework, but it should help prioritise teams focusing on solving most valuable problems not just delivering predefined solutions - this is project and creation of a sausage machine not a product led approach.

Visualise the workflow - use a kanban board, see the flow of work and ensure that you use as the basis of conversation everyday; Decision making should be based on pulling the most valuable work through and work in progress (WIP) limits used to prevent people pulling too much work through at any one time (e.g. I use a WIP limit of 3 - I can only have a maximum of 3 items on my board and being worked on at any time).

Make sure that teams are empowered to pull work over receiving work pushed to them by others - the perfect storm is when this work is pushed without any value assessment (why are we doing this?) or a real understanding of the what it is.

Watch this 2 minute whiteboard where we tell you more about how this can be achieved and subscribe for updates when new videos are published.