Why most product planning is bad and what to do about it
blog.railway.com
Why most product planning is bad and what to do about it
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Re: Why most product planning is bad and what to do about it
#2Meandering post which struggles to get to the point.
The font is extremely thin which makes it unnecessarily hard to read.
A lot of jargon and abbreviations also hinder understanding.
Re: Why most product planning is bad and what to do about it
#3Weighted Shortest Job First with clear articulations of value is the way. This problem driven development approach seems like a decent take on that.
Re: Why most product planning is bad and what to do about it
#4Meandering post which struggles to get to the point. The font is extremely thin which makes it unnecessarily hard to read. A lot of jargon and abbreviations also hinder understanding.
You can skip to the "The Four-Day Process" at the end to get the gist.
But for people living in an organisation suffering from those problems, reading how other solutions were tried and how they failed is valuable, and it puts things in context of why the recommended approach may work best.
Re: Why most product planning is bad and what to do about it
#5Am I getting it wrong? It sounds like they're still doing quarterly planning just with a different ritual?
I had hoped they'd realise quarterly planning is a bad premise and asked themselves why they do it.
If you have a mature product where you add incremental features, you don't need that plan because it's just an arbitrary block of pretty fungible work.
If you're still looking for product market fit, that three month plan wont last a week before becoming obsolete.
If you need to build a bigger thing that is only valuable once it's all done, you A: need a project and B: probably don't because it will fail.
Re: Why most product planning is bad and what to do about it
#6Most planing is bad for two reasons that we never talk about.
1. The wrong metrics: Ultimately the only metric that matters is money. Is this saving us money, are we wasting money. Every feature has a cost, and we are decent about tracking its construction costs but not its operational costs. This matters when you're paying for every iota of infra on AWS.
2. No one ever gets promoted for ripping out a feature that costs too much to run or doesn't retain customers, or is under used. Heath of the product as a whole isnt always about growing the business, sometimes it's about running it.
Re: Why most product planning is bad and what to do about it
#7"Focus on problems, not solutions" is pretty standard practice. Seems like author cherry picks some abstract concept of "bigco" and their process-driven planning. I guess.
Came here to say, I don't deny those anecdotes, but just as many companies can and do intuit "what problem are we solving?" and then come up with some potential solutions in meetings across stakeholders. That's called planning. Time-box it and move on to some face-reality testing.
Planning anything, in any way, is imperfect. Partly fed by over-pontificating about the perfect way to plan!
Re: Why most product planning is bad and what to do about it
#8I always found product planning went poorly because the bosses of the people making the plans would make heads roll if you couldn’t draw them 7 parallel red lines, 3 of them being perpendicular, and in green ink
They’d get a plan that made them happy in the moment, we’d inevitably go off the rails in a few weeks but in a politically satisfactory way. Mission accomplished would be declared and then we’d start all over again next quarter/year.
That is unless you are working under the SAFe framework in which case you cut out all that time wasted trying to execute on the impossible plan and just doing constant rolling, planning of planning
Re: Why most product planning is bad and what to do about it
#9I must have missed something, because this seems to say you do capacity and headcount planning and publicly commit to the work before you know how to solve the problem? This seems like the “draw the rest of the owl” part of this process…
Re: Why most product planning is bad and what to do about it
#10Am I getting it wrong? It sounds like they're still doing quarterly planning just with a different ritual? I had hoped they'd realise quarterly planning is a bad premise and asked themselves why they do it. If you have a mature product where you add incremental features, you don't need that plan because it's just an arbitrary block of pretty fungible work. If you're still looking for product market fit, that three mo…
Hello there! Author there, and surprised/delighted with the response. I don't think we had the issue with the cadence, the quarter is arbitrary, but we think it gives us the ability to just go heads down to focus.
With that said, one thing we did and I don't why we did it was that we would "re-justify" why we would want to work on something every three months which isn't great. There is a world where if we had more eng. resources we could have more people than problems and we could take stuff on board as it arrives, but for us deciding on what to work on is a hard decision.
I also agree that market fit is a key factor. I think Railway was lucky that we didn't have to pivot the product 3 to 5 times to get some latch.
What would be the post-quarterty planning process that you would like to see?