Business Savvy Software

Scoping is about two things:  understanding the bigger picture and saying no.

You have to say no to 100 things so you can say yes to the one right thing.  Some people say ‘good is the enemy of best’ – ie saying yes too soon means you’ll settle for a good solution but not the best.  Others say, ‘best is the enemy of good’ – ie if you strive for perfection you’ll never deliver anything, so its better to get something good out the door.  

Both are true, so how can you make such calls if you don’t have an understanding of the bigger picture?  Of course there’s always a bigger picture to the bigger picture, but that’s important too because eventually you’ll work your way right back to the company’s strategies and vision.

To make good decisions and to empower yourself to say no 100 times, you need to know where an idea fits.  9 times out of 10 you’ll hear a solution before you understand the problem, so you need to start by working back to the problem, then understand who the problem applies to, then understand what the solution is, then understand what the ideal solution is and how that fits in with the rest of the product.

Once you understand how it fits (and this is usually a thought process or a discussion – not a meeting or a document), then you can start to scope it back to a deliverable project.

At Xero, we tend to deliver a feature in stages of:

Entry level – get a solution into the hands of users so the feedback can begin.  80/20 rule applies.

Easiest – our goal is to be the easiest accounting system, which means supporting some edge cases and hiding complexity.

Automated – we save users time by removing tasks that they shouldn’t have to do manually. 

Innovate – once we have a great solution and really understand the problem domain, we can introduce game changing innovations.

We only design one stage at a time and the next stage will be designed based on user feedback.  Each of these stages generally represent a project that will be scoped and prioritised into the roadmap but usually won’t be delivered in consecutive releases. 

Product Lifecycle: Part 1 – solving problems
Product Lifecycle: Part 2 – scope
Product Lifecycle: Part 3 – the roadmap
Product Lifecycle: Part 4 – delivering