Dahlia Season Consulting

Originally published November 16, 2016 on cocktailmonkey.blog

In the last post, we looked at going faster by optimizing your system for the humans that produce the product. Here we have more examples of concrete ways you can change your organization to actually create product faster.

Humans Work Faster and Better When They Are Happy, Healthy and  Motivated!

• Antiquated HR practices can be highly demotivating. Get rid of old PTO tracking systems, or in fact, tracking PTO at all. Ditch obsolete performance appraisal and management practices; they are some of the most demotivating experiences people have at work, plus they waste tons of time.
• Stop dictating to people. Let people know what needs to be done and then step back and let the team figure out how best to get the job done.
• Get rid of bad bosses and incompetent coworkers. Both are highly demotivating.
• If someone is sick, make sure they keep their cooties at home. Sick people don’t do good work, let alone good work fast.
• Scrub your environment for practices and interactions that make the people scream, “GAR! GAR! GAR!” Anything that makes the people who build the product distracted and disgruntled makes the features come out slower. Or not at all when everyone quits.

Humans Can Build Product Faster when they aren’t Doing Other Things!

• Stop hiring if you really need to move fast. Everything about hiring slows down product development. Screening and interviewing candidates, arguing about who should get an offer, and convincing people they want to work with you can take tremendous amounts of time.
• Stop hiring if you really need to move fast! On-boarding new team members is also a huge drag on a team. A new person, even if they will be awesome, is a net negative until they are not. They are a distraction. They slow you down.

Humans Build Product Faster when they Know What They’re Building!

• Understanding what your customer base wants in a product is key to building that product quickly. There is nothing slower than throwing out entire features because it wasn’t the thing that was needed.
• Product pivots can be slow while you figure out how to pivot.
• Routing work to teams who are building product in a smooth and steady manner is key. If teams don’t know what they’re creating, the right thing isn’t going to be released quickly.
• Don’t build what you don’t need to. Maximizing the work you don’t do speeds up what you build. Be ruthless on this one.

Humans Build Product Faster When They Have What They Need!

• Share all of the information with all of the people. When moving fast, every person needs to make quick and sound decisions about what and how to build the product. To do that, they need all of the available information so that they can make great decisions.
• Give all of the people the power to buy stuff. Nothing slows down product creation like getting blocked on fetching 13 approvals for a $150 purchase.
• Use your networks! Use all of the brains available! No human knows everything. Reach out to other people in your company and use your collective brain to engage creativity and execution at the highest levels.

Keep It Clean; Keep It Flexible

• One of the most difficult things to do to be fast now and in the future is to write clean code and keep your product architecture relatively flexible.

So, there you have it: a few dozen ways to GO FASTER! I’m sure there are many more. What have you seen work in your startup? How fast did you go? Did it make the difference between survival and extinction?