Dev Team Workflow Optimization

People often equate software development with building physical things, like a house or a bridge, when in reality, they couldn't be more different.

Building software means confronting complexity head on. It means pushing the boundaries of what's possible, and creating experiences that change human behavior.

Creating software is is an exercise in navigating—not suppressing—uncertainty. Those that can create meaningful predictability within that uncertainty have an unfair advantage against all of their competitors.

Most scaling startups hit a tipping point where there's too much complexity to grasp all at once, so they try to create predictability through control from above: top-down mandated processes, RACI charts, manual status reports, decision gates.

These tactics may be well intentioned, but they aren't effective at enabling the people doing the work to navigate its uncertainties.

There's a better way.

Startups can create predictability by balancing autonomy for their teams to design their workflow with accountability from leadership for the outcomes of their designs.

This setup gives the team clear ownership of how they do their work with a clear expectation to produce improved (at first) and consistent (over time) throughput over time.

Startups who practice this balance of autonomy with accountability experience:

1. Greater predictability with cross-team dependencies: 
   Forecasts become based on actual productivity and insights about the current state of the work, not wishful thinking about meaningless sprint points and velocity 'metrics'.
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2. Increased trust from customers: 
   Improved forecasting from dev teams means implementation teams have more reliable information with which to set delivery timelines with customers.
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3. Higher trust between teams and leadership:
   Your dev teams will feel a greater sense of trust from you and belief in their ability to drive success for customers and the business. You will be able to see first hand how your teams are driving quality and effectiveness into their work without additional overhead.
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4. Enhanced employee engagement and productivity: high accountability employees derive tremendous energy and engagement from taking ownership of their work and driving results that matter to their team and company.

• Document your end-to-end development workflow to understand how an idea goes from initial development to live with a customer
• Gather data on team cycle times, throughput, and work in progress to baseline the current state
• Equip your dev team to define the base elements of their workflow and methods to inspect and improve it as a team
• Establish methods to gather feedback about this changes and share its results

Assumptions:

• Average Contract Value: $20,000 AAR
• Implementations scheduled in the next 12 months: 5
• Forecasted new customer acquisition (with implementation) in the next 12 months: 5
• Current customers: 20
• Current time-to-implement a customer: 4 months
• Implementations burn rate per month: $10,000
• Current time to develop and launch a new feature for existing customers: 3 months
• Features developed and released in the next 12 months: 4
• Engineering burn rate per month: $15,000

Benefits: $250,000

• Improved time to implement a customer: 25%
• Improved time to develop and launch a new feature: 20%
• Reduced churn risk by customers from improved satisfaction from their launch experience: 20%
• Net new features developed: 1
• Reduced churn risk by current customers from new features adopted: 20%
• Increased revenue from improved implementations (assumes 2 more months per customer implemented): $30,000
• Costs avoided improved implementations: $100,000
• Customer churn avoided from improved implementations: $40,000
• Customer churn avoided from new features released (including current customers): $80,000