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Value Focus

What is Value Focus?

Value Focus is ensuring you prioritise work by balancing the effort and value ratio of your development. Everyone in Platform Development is responsible for delivering value everyday - to our users, customers, the business, and to our platform. Because there are so many ways to deliver value, we must prioritise our work in a way that allows the delivery of the most amount of value to the highest number of people in the shortest time possible.

What has value?

To become Value Focused and prioritise work that delivers the highest value, we need to be engaging with our users and customers during the Discovery Zone. This will allow us to deeply understand present problems and assign value to solving them by disambiguating the user, customer and business impact. How to achieve Value Focus?

Tenets

  1. Become a user: by listening to our users, empathising with their problems and understanding their needs we can understand how best to deliver value to them.

  2. Seek out feedback & actively listen: proactively seek feedback from users, customers and the business and take this feedback seriously. We can do this via lots of different methods such as informal conversations, building relationships that include regular communication, building our network of contacts via customer-facing teams, or more formal methods such as focus groups, surveys, requesting engagement through ProductBoard, or interrogating usage data.

  3. Understand business value: we must continually engage with the direction of travel across the business and ensure we have a deep understanding of our business's mission, values and therefore strategic ambitions. We can do this in many ways; by interrogating available business financials, critically engaging with company communications around goals, ensure we understand what work we're carrying out support launching products/publications etc., ensuring the creation of our department and team OKRs align with these goals and link hierarchically to them.

  4. Cross-business collaboration: by understanding business value we are then well positioned to collaborate with the wider business; consider the goals, aims and OKRs of other departments and where we have shared goals or aims. Seek out opportunities to approach problems collaboratively and work together to deliver value. This means that there may be ways of deliver the most value for the business by pooling our resources with other departments to support each department's objectives,

  5. Be realistic: we don't have time or budget to deliver all developments. If we choose to deliver this value then what are we not delivering? Focusing on value provides a guiding principle for us to be empowered to say no to certain developments, which will then allow us to focus on the highest value areas.

  6. Effectively prioritise: The process of factoring in all this information (user value, customer value, business value, understanding our business and department goals and balancing this against budget and resource) is prioritisation. By engaging with value and what this means for AM, we are empowered to effectively prioritise and have a framework to transparently share this prioritisation with the wider business.

  7. Get it out quickly: every release doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be better. Iterative developments enable use to more quickly deliver value and by reflecting on the success of releases we can work to continually improve our work.

  8. Measure success: This is an essential part of value-focused delivery. We must review whether we delivered value after we've released a development. We should ask ourselves questions before working on developments, throughout our work and after a development is released. Questions like: what will success look like for this development? During development -- are we still focusing on value? By our planned measures, was it successful? If so, why? If not, why? What have we learned? What can we do differently next time to improve?