Flow enables efficacy
This will be one of those posts that those who know me in person will immediately recognize "myself" on... In the sense that I am about to take you through a bit of a journey on how my brain works, and it works more like an entangled network, and not that linearly. So if you are more of a "straighter thinker", so to speak, you've been warned, but hopefully you will still bear with me here…
A bit more than a month ago, I wrote a post about (creating) focus, where I mentioned how much that was on my mind. I've used the metaphor, which acts as an enabling rule of "what you build will own you" to illustrate my thinking of the overarching mentality that we should have in product development and then offered some tactical strategies to help create that focus.
That also points out that there isn't a dichotomy, or any sort of conflict, between efficacy and efficiency, which was exactly my previous post. And that is something I regularly try to coach my product managers (PMs) about.
To state that PMs should focus on value, doing the right thing, so efficacy, is to state the obvious. There's nothing wrong with it, but it may miss a trick, particularly when it doesn’t come along with a concern about flow (efficiency).
Now that we have all these somewhat loose points as context, let me tie them together for you and, in fact, showcase how they are ultimately connected (at least in my mind, or as far as I am concerned…). Let me start doing that by telling you a bit of a story…
When was the last time you visualized how much work is in progress at all relevant levels in the teams you work with?
I can give you my experience with it, and it's quite likely you would be surprised with how many "battlefronts" teams have open. That essentially means that there is no focus.
That was the situation I observed once I joined my current role. I wasn't surprised, knowing how common it is, but I still couldn't help being amazed. So I started to do just one thing, apart from talking about the obvious importance of focusing: provide signals (measurements of lead time, initially) to act as a reflection mechanism.
Many months down the line, we can now clearly see the change in behavior in our flow of delivery. Here are a couple of insights on that, at an aggregate level across the +10 teams that my team of (data) PMs supports:
Clear outliers on the lead time of deliverables reduced from +20 to 1 when comparing the last three months to the previous six months.
At higher percentiles (more confidence), last 3 months lead times were cut significantly (see graph below) when compared with year-to-date.
Does that assure that customers are more satisfied with what we are delivering, in terms of what matters most, the value (efficacy)? Not necessarily. But it does have rather concrete implications, like ensuring that deliverables get to their hands faster (with that also reducing the cycle of feedback & learning), as well as with less variability (more predictable). So, one can argue that this is the very foundation for building customer trust. And obviously, there is (albeit not as tangible) value to it.
Creating flow by focusing on having fewer work fronts in parallel is a means to an end. It's a path that also recognizes the underlying uncertainty around a (digital) product, with its "curse" (of living in the realm of infinite possibilities, which might be distracting) but also "blessing" (allowing to easily change so to try to figure out what works best and where is the product-fit).
I do believe that once you get your head around all of this and how they are connected, you will realize that there can't be such a thing as leading a product development without having proper concern about flow (efficiency), while still keeping the clarity that the focus, in terms of what we want to achieve, is somewhere else, more on the efficacy side of things.
There's a quote from Matt Wallaert that I think helps to understand the underlying concept rather well:
“We’ll prioritize outcome over process, while recognizing that some processes get you better outcomes”.
By Rodrigo Sperb, feel free to connect (I only refuse invites from people clearly with an agenda to ‘coldly’ sell something to me), happy to engage and interact