Still struggling to deliver apps or digital products on time? Here are the four principles that underpin our success.
Why is digital product development still so hard?
Over the past 20 years, I’ve worked in dozens of development teams and connected with hundreds of developers. By and large, they were smart, motivated people trying their best to deliver high-quality work on time and budget.
And yet… if you’ve been a product owner or team leader, you’ll likely know the pain and suffering of digital delivery.
Patchy progress. Missed deadlines. Broken features. High-team turnover. Amateur mistakes and misunderstandings. Unchecked feature creep. Stressful meetings. Angry clients. Knock-on effects that (arrggg) force the next project onto the back foot.
Many of these frustrations are burned into developers like a brand… along with sleepless nights and ego depletion. In more extreme cases, entire careers are impacted, not to mention the clients and businesses that rely on the work.
It shouldn’t be this way. We have Lean, Agile, Scrum, Kanban, and hybrid methodologies of every hue. We have tools and processes that our technical forebears could only have dreamt of.
So why does digital product development still feel like juggling smoke?
My answer… and I say this as a 20-year veteran, is that effective digital delivery doesn’t start with tools and methodologies.
At UX Consultancy and Creation On Demand, we’ve built our reputation on four simple principles. There’s nothing radical about them except that they just work. Whether you are an in-house department or a remote team like us, they’ll help you accelerate digital delivery.
But before we look at them, let’s answer an obvious question.
Why put principles before processes?
Why principles first? Because they streamline and simplify most of my decision-making. In a market constantly offering new and shiny ideas, principles keep us focused on the fundamentals.
If that new tool or process isn’t helping you do the work that matters most, it shouldn’t matter how shiny it is.
Our principles save time, but be warned—there are no magic bullets here. Nothing I’m about to reveal will stun or surprise you. If anything, your reaction will be muted disappointment. Of course, you’ll think. I know this. Why are you wasting my time, Matt? I’ve got piles of unread emails…
And you’ll be tempted to move to your next internet snack.
But that would be a mistake.
Knowing is not the same as doing. Although you’ll recognize the principles below, the likelihood that you have truly and genuinely internalised them is far smaller. Few development teams have.
As with much of life… it’s not the ideas that matter; it’s the discipline and commitment to follow them through.
The four principles we built our house on
In future articles, I’ll explain how we inject these principles into our day-to-day work, but for now, I want to focus on the basics.
Principle 1: Trust
Trust is the single biggest accelerator in our business—perhaps any business. Trust between teammates. Trust between partners. Trust between agencies and their clients.
Nothing is more important, but there are a couple of real challenges here.
First, you can’t just go out and get some trust. It’s like happiness, a side-effect of other things. This is apparent from our in-house playbook, which lists ten trust-building practices:
Valuing long-term relationships. We are in business for the long term and act accordingly.
Honesty. We always tell the truth, even if it’s awkward.
Honouring our commitments: When we make a promise, we follow through.
Admitting when we’re wrong. When we make a mistake, we own it.
Clear communication. We are precise in our speech and writing. If we aren’t sure about something, we ask for clarification.
Being helpful. Without agenda, we strive to be helpful to our customers and colleagues.
Caring. We show we care by being interested in other people. Remembering the little details goes a long way.
Standing up for what’s right. We won’t sacrifice our values for what’s quick and easy (see 1).
Transparency. We explain what we’re doing and why—and gladly share our expertise.
Being vulnerable. We aren’t superhuman. Sharing our problems or fears isn’t a weakness; it’s a strength—especially when we all help each other.
Working in this way inevitably builds trust, both within the team and with our clients. The practices are simple, but simple is not the same as easy. I’ve worked in enough teams to understand how easy it can be to make a mistake.
The “white lie” about timings for a stalled project.
The rushed email that sacrifices accuracy for speed.
The pressure to “work through the night” (that precedes the inevitable burnout).
Trust is valuable precisely because it is so hard to create. That’s why our three remaining principles are designed to help us earn and deserve it.
Principle 2: Clarity
Although we touched on communication above, Clarity is critical enough to be its own principle. I’ve seen more projects fail due to poor communication than anything else:
Bad RFPs waste everyone’s time.
Poor proposals lose bids… or win them (which is often worse)!
Hurried emails cause confusion.
Poor mockups require questions and revisions.
Hiding issues—or ass-covering—wastes everyone’s time.
In future articles, I’ll detail how we build clarity into our tools and processes, but for now, here are the simple guidelines we follow:
We pay attention to the details.
We ask clarifying questions.
We finish our conversations only when we are sure everyone understands.
We document our meetings.
We ensure our project documentation is consistent.
The goal here is simple… for everyone to understand exactly what’s been agreed, their role within the project, what’s expected of them, and when.
Again, simple isn’t always the same as easy, but taking the time to be clear avoids all manner of self-inflicted wounds.
Let’s look at another way to make life easier…
Principle 3: Visibility
Digital product development can feel like an iceberg, with 90% of the effort hidden from view on hard drives or cloud servers. If you run a remote team, as we do, it can be harder still to know what’s going on.
And that’s an issue because effective development requires visibility—of people, progress, and problems. As a product owner or team leader, I need to be able to take a quick look around my (virtual) room and see the status of the project. Is everything where I expect it to be? Is something falling behind? Does someone need help?
The gold standard is this: No surprises.
Visibility of progress gives you and the client confidence. But if you can’t have that—we all work in the real world, after all—the next best thing is an early warning if there’s an issue. High visibility of people and their work allows us to course correct when snags occur.
There are numerous ways to increase visibility, from standups to kanban boards. We’ll cover many of these methods in future articles, but at a basic level, we have our team members follow these guidelines.
While working, we will:
Be present and visible to our colleagues (whether in the room or on Slack).
Let teammates know if we’re unavailable: in a meeting, on focus time, at lunch, etc.
Check in often, ensuring that our tasks are properly tracked.
Attend meetings on time and be ready to focus.
Surface issues or questions as soon as they arise—no waiting.
Principle 4: Consistency
To state the obvious, it’s no good doing a great job once.
Great teams don’t just deliver; they deliver every time. Day in. Day out. Rain or shine. Relentless performance is a crazy powerful trust generator, and the secret to getting it is really no secret at all.
Consistent teams follow consistent processes, use consistent tools, and act in a (say it with me) consistent way.
It blows my mind that so many companies still develop on an ad-hoc basis. It pains me that so many others do the work to develop a process only to abandon it when things get tough.
I’ll talk about the processes and accelerators we use in future articles, but for now, I want to highlight the critical importance of having a documented way of doing things. For example:
We don’t develop our wireframes until we know our user stories.
We don’t map out user stories unless we’ve gone through our Discovery process (step by step) to understand the nuance of what the client is looking for.
True consistency can require real discipline at first, but trust me, it gets easier… and then it becomes your engine of growth.
To be clear, I’m not saying you shouldn’t change or evolve. Quite the opposite. Once you have an agreed standard of work, you have something that can be tested and improved. For example, the process we use to write and publish this article will likely look very different six months from now.
Stick around. Maybe I’ll write an article on it.
Putting the pieces together
When you’ve made as many mistakes as I have (and delivered as many projects), it’s hard to ignore the patterns around you—especially this one...
Trust makes every aspect of business easier—and the way to build trust is to consistently and visibly do what you say you are going to do.
See how that works?
There’s nothing radical about our list other than the fact that we live by it, building the principles into our workflows and processes.
But that’s a story for another time.
In the meantime, which of the principles would be easiest for you to improve in your business or team? The first answer is usually clarity or visibility, but your mileage may vary.
