Nature, Impact and Value of Change

In this article, I'm sharing lesson and learning about change. How understanding nature, impact and value of change resulted into more clarity and confidence and helped me to prepare release plan.

Situation 🤺

Like my other colleagues, I also have been part of such Task force couple of times. But recently in my task force, it was becoming very hard to come up with proper release plan. We're struggling to make a release plan which can be delivered incrementally and iteratively.

Background 📜

What is task force ? 🤔

At layer we form a triplet of Tech, Product and Business in order to refine features. Mostly one person from each area. Sometimes Product owner represents expertise in business or act as proxy for business. For each epic people rotates from each area. This helps to create opportunities to learn, grow and avoid biases in the company. We called such triplet as Task force.

Task force has following responsibility 💪

• Refine feature aka epic
• Be a point of contact for all the QA during crunch time.
• Prepare release plan

Still picture was not very clear in 🧠

We had few brainstorming meetings but still picture was not very clear in our head; so I decided to analyse this epic critically and come up some options.

What we did 🤞

I decided to start from clean slate and look at this feature from users point of view. To do that I asked following question for each concepts and change that we wanted to bring in.

1. What problem it solves for user?
2. What problem it might create for user?
3. What is the nature of this changes?
   • Breaking change - if it breaks or changes existing concept/feature drastically and changes affects user flow.
   • New change - there was no such concepts exist before into the system and it may or may not affect user flow.
   • Enhancement - changes refines existing concepts but not so drastically and may not affect user flow.

After doing this analysis and spending few hours, I realised more than 70 % changes were either enhancement and new changes and ~ 30 % were breaking changes. Just doing analysis unblocked very big chunk of feature and it bring ton of clarity in my head.

For breaking changes, I did one extra step I asked same 3 questions for existing feature to gain more clarity. After that, I knew exactly what we're taking out and giving back to the user. Now it was very easy to spot and fill the gaps.

In summary

I learned that understanding nature, impact and value it brings to the user are very crucial aspects.

1. Picture credits goes to Aziz Acharki

2. NOTE: If you have similar learning, please share your experience with me. There is always something new about every experience.