What do you celebrate? Are you really done?

January 2024

Going back a few years I remember starting work at a Melbourne based company, on my first week I attended what they called a "group standup". Individuals and teams would share information on their work, providing a level of transparency around the work underway as a digital team. Various people took turns to walk the board, a large set of swim lanes across a physical board. When a feature was moved into "Done" (new functions going live to customers), people would get a cheer and clap, and at the next session, I observed the same people move quickly onto developing another feature.

People were celebrating the delivery of new features, fair enough, but there was no apparent view on why, connected to business outcomes.

• What are we learning from these newly delivered capabilities?

• How are the customers using these new features?

• Why did we develop and deliver these functions to our customers and how are we measuring the outcome we hoped to achieve?

These type of questions should not be an afterthought, or in this case not a thought at all. They should be front and centre of every piece of work if you want to reduce risk and learn about meeting your customers needs or addressing their problems.

This behaviour is surprisingly not uncommon.

However good you think your research is, you never really know how successful your product is until it's in your customer's hands. Seek ways to measure and learn from these efforts and a feedback loop to build these learnings back in.

Celebrate learning and outcomes, not a delivery output.