Must We Build This Now?
By: Kristian Zondervan
Tags: Product Development, Agile, Refinement, Software Development, Startup

A checklist that helps you stop building products and features that shouldn’t be build at all. At least for now.

As I’ve been involved in many different software projects of many sizes and in many roles the last decade I’ve seen some projects fail and some succeed. There are many reasons and influences that contribute to the outcome but in general I think one of biggest wastes is building something that should not have been build at all.

There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all.

- Peter Drucker

In this article I’ll try to give you a list of questions which can help you prevent this. But first:

The question that helps taking the pressure off

A while ago someone mentioned a question that you can ask yourself when you feel swamped in work and “high-priority” things keep popping up: “Must I do this now?” You can place the emphasis on every word in this sentence switching the paradigm every time in looking at the “problem” at hand.

Must I do this now?

Must I do this now?

Must I do this now?

Must I do this now?

Must I do this now?

Applying it to product and software development

I really like this question as it helps looking at a problem from different angles. Also it’s very hard to answer all these 5 questions with “yes” which helps you see there isn’t really a high priority problem at hand. Thereby lowering your cortisol levels.

But, in a slightly different way, I also think it’s very useful in both product- and software development teams. Both on macro (products, epics, services) and micro (stories, bugs, code) level. The question becomes:

Must we build this now?

Must we build this now?

Must we build this now?

Must we build this now?

Must we build this now?

Every change of emphasis helps you looking differently at the pitch, problem, solution, story, task at hand. This is super useful to apply in refinements helping you to ask the right questions. Or looking in the mirror when dreaming of the next big thing you envision.

Simplicity — the art of maximizing the amount of work not done — is essential.

- Agile Manifesto

Must

Must we build this now?

A scrum master I used to work with at a former company would ask us: Will there be pouring blood out? Meaning something bad would happen if we won’t do.

Is the task at hand validated? Do we know (for certain) there is a real need?

Is it a must-have or nice-to-have?

Is it a question from a single customer? Or many?

Do the customers/users know what they need?

Are you obligated to do this?

Are you in love with the solution? (You should be in love with the problem)

We

Must we build this now?

Are we the right team to build this?

Is this the service it should be in?

Are we the right people to solve this problem?

Can we delegate this to other people/teams?

Build

Must we build this now?

Is this something we should build?

Can we rent it?

Can we buy it?

Can we use a BaaS or SaaS to solve this problem?

Can we manually fix the problem (without automation)?

Should this problem be solved with automation at all?

This

Must we build this now?

Will this specific feature help our customer?

Do we know for sure the exact root cause/problem?

Are we building the minimal needed?

Are there alternatives in solving the problem?

Is this solution based on opinions?

Is this solution based on assumptions?

Did we talk to enough real users/customers?

Now

Must we build this now?

Is this something we need to do now?

Is this part of the MVP? Is this the phase in which we should build this?

Is this nice to have or must have at this moment?

Do we need to fix this bug right now?

To conclude

Asking the above questions certainly helped me and I hope it helps you as well.

“Life’s too short to build something nobody wants. “- Ash Maurya

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Attributions

Header: Business photo created by jcomp — www.freepik.com