Stop Chasing Paper Victories and Make Winning Products
I’m cursed.
For some strange reason I’ve been involved in six complete product rebuilds, ranging from commercial homeruns earning hundreds of millions to complete duds that cost millions of dollars.
Through this journey, I’ve experienced different approaches to formulating requirements ranging from completely winging it to minutely describing every single detail. To paint a picture, I once received a picture of a picture of the back of a beer coaster as a requirements document, and another time I had to work with a 20 page flowchart that precisely described how it should work in every scenario.
What surprised me, is that the requirements on the beer coaster were actually far better than the elaborate flowchart. Clear and elaborate requirements don’t mean a great product, in fact, I often saw them make products worse. I’ve even seen poor requirements result in great products.
Both clear and inadequate requirements can distract us from what truly matters. Either they are perfectly described, but put us on the wrong foot, or they are poorly described and we waste our time with guessing and polishing them to acceptable level. It wasn’t the quality of the requirements that really mattered, but the degree with which they distracted us from what we’re trying to accomplish.
In this talk I will try to answer the following questions: how do we prevent being fooled by our requirements?
Why is our brain hard-wired to formulate requirements that set us up for failure?
How do we make our requirements work for us, instead of against us?
How do we prevent getting sucked into useless discussions to perfect requirements and how do we prevent poor requirements that cause us to constantly guess what we’re trying to accomplish?
In other words: how do we prevent getting sucked into the requirement delusion?
Meet Maarten Dalmijn
Maarten Dalmijn is a consultant, speaker, and trainer at Dalmijn Consulting. He is the author of the book Driving Value with Sprint Goals.
Maarten helps teams to beat the feature factory all over the world. Millions of practitioners have read his best-practice articles on Agile, Scrum, and Product Management. He specializes in helping companies build empowered teams to discover better ways of delivering value.
He has been working as a Product Leader. He’s focused on coaching teams to deliver the highest value for their customers. One of his hobbies is writing articles. He shares his ideas on Substack and loves learning from everyone.
Maarten is a frequent speaker at Fortune 500 companies and international industry conferences. He has worked with many award-winning start-ups and scale-ups. He is an ambassador and editor at Serious Scrum, the largest Scrum publication on Medium.