Over time your team will naturally discover more about it’s users, employees and technology but you need to actively accelerate this. Here are three key ingredients:
1. Users are a key ingredient. How can you make them awesome? You want to find out, “Given I want outcome X, will change Y get me there?”. Hypothesis and experiments are one way of framing this.
2. Technology is a key ingredient. You need a clear vision. Engineers need plenty of slack so that they can explore ways to simplify and enhance the system. The vision and the exploration are symbiotic – this exploration informs the vision, and the vision guides the exploration.
For example, the product I work on now is complex with nearly 200,000 lines of code. The technical vision needs to give a clear view of where the complexity lies, so that the exploration is focused on the areas that matter.
3. Employees are a key ingredient. Deep collaboration helps members of the team understand each other. It also accelerates knowledge sharing so that individuals don’t become a bottleneck.
Having slack creates space for collaboration.
Do you know what your key ingredients are?