Key Takeaways
The first step to untrapping your team is reviewing your current situation. Understanding the dynamics can reveal opportunities to simplify your development flow.
Symptoms of a feature factory include a lack of goals, output obsession, delivering solutions that solve no problem, unclear direction, unwillingness to drop ideas, and inattention to results. The opposite of a feature factory is an empowered team that focuses on outcomes and is eager to inspect and adapt continuously.
The closer you are to a coordinative development flow, the longer it takes to deliver value and the more waste you create. Coordinative flows unwittingly transform plans into goals.
The closer you are to a collaborative development flow, the sooner you create value and the less waste you produce. Collaboration helps you adapt plans to reach your goals when reality makes your plan obsolete.
When you fully understand the product development flow, you can foster changes step by step. The first step is collaborating with business stakeholders and team members to recognize what’s unnecessarily complex. Equipped with that knowledge, you can gain support and collaborate to simplify your work.
In this chapter, we discussed how teams commonly work. That’s a critical piece of the puzzle, but it isn’t the only reason teams struggle to deliver value. Chapter 2 covers another fundamental aspect: how the mindset affects digital product creation.