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There are a limited number of investments that a team can make in any given year and it can be daunting to choose the “right” ones. In R&D, there is always more to do. There is always more to research, design, build, fix, maintain, and improve. Spread across multiple domains, the possibilities multiply: we’re spoiled for choice—and, while inspiring, the breadth of possible investment areas can be overwhelming.
To simplify our options, I keep coming back to “the future” and “the floor.” At an overarching level, we want to deliver new value as quickly as possible (the future) while maintaining a positive user experience of our existing product lines (the floor). Cut your decision tree down to size and streamline your messaging by defining your own future and floor.
Identifying the future(s)
To define your team’s future, reflect on where your company is trying to go:
- What does the ideal company future look like? Presumably, the company is trying to grow—so what drives growth at your business? If you’re at a B2B SaaS company, odds are high that your company wants to increase its customer base (especially of large, enterprise customers) and upsell to existing customers.
- Within your team, what are the core domains and user flows that you own? How do those map up to company growth drivers?
- Review your potential investments through the lens of these drivers: what work could your team do to push for positive growth in these areas?
- Of those possibilities, which is likely to have the most significant impact on growth and positive outcomes in the future?
Once your possible futures are arrayed, investments in those areas can be compared and stack-ranked side-by-side against organizational goals. For example, this quarter we want to focus on winning more customers by demonstrating value early.
This future/floor framing leaves us with a world of possibility while giving us the tools to evaluate each possible investment by asking ourselves: is this investment area the one that will best demonstrate value early? Relative to what else in our portfolio? And organizationally?
Identifying the floor(s)
To define your team’s floor, identify the Minimum Respectable User Experience (MRX) for each of your core domains and user flows. To define your team’s floor, you’ll need to align with your stakeholders on reasonable levels of polish and performance. Consider:
- Of your team’s core domains and user flows, what are the critical happy paths? What are the most important user paths through the system?
- What level of inbound support tickets are reasonable for your support team to fix?
- What signals do you have to pull on?
- What SLOs need to be maintained?
Within our own product
Nice to have: making a new SLO (this functionality could break for a while, and it would be embarrassing for us and annoying to customers, but it would not hurt existing SLOs configured by customers).
Need to have: functional alerting for customers on their own systems (if this feature broke, our customers would lose visibility into their systems).
An engineering team can reasonably support as many tracks of work as the number of engineers on the team divided by two, rounded down.
Bring everything back to the future and the floor
Once your future and floor definitions are in place, use them as your guide. You should be pushing toward the future while maintaining the floor.
Use the future/floor framing as tools to evaluate each possible investment by asking:
- Is this investment area the one that will best move the needle on the future?
- Relative to what else in our portfolio?
- And organizationally?
- Is this investment necessary to maintain the floor?
- If so, why?
Reassuringly repetitive
At its core, the future/the floor framing is quite similar to the idea of pairing indicators that Andy Grove promotes in High Output Management.
To ensure the best possible outcome, pair two metrics that are in tension with each other. A speed indicator without a quality indicator will result in product sadness. A quality indicator without a speed companion may never show much progress.
Ultimately, within an R&D organization, we try to build new value as quickly as possible, and we always need to maintain some degree of underpinning quality. It’s not quite a universal law, but it’s permanent enough to bring me a familiar comfort. Always.
