Want To Build Better Products? Try Working in Sprints
In the fast-moving world of product development, where saving time means saving money and staying ahead of competitors, the key to success often lies in reducing the time it takes to learn about what your customers think of your products.
This learning process is what largely guides every decision you make about your products to make them successful. One of the most effective ways to do this, is by working in Sprints.
What is a Sprint?
A Sprint is a fixed duration of time during which all product development activities happen to achieve a specific goal. A Sprint typically run for a duration of 1 to 4 weeks, depending on the complexity of the work involved. This concept originated from the Scrum Framework but has become popular in various fields because of its benefits.
To get started with Sprints, the first step is to break down your product into smaller, manageable pieces of work needed to build its features. These work items are compiled into a comprehensive list known as the 'Product Backlog.' With your Product Backlog in hand, you can begin working on a selected set of items during your first Sprint and continue working through the rest in subsequent Sprints.
Sprint Illustration
How Sprints Can Increase Your Product’s Success
1. Clarity in Work Items
By consistently breaking down your product into smaller work items, Sprints enable the creation of clearer and more straightforward tasks. This clarity reduces the time spent talking about the work, reviewing it, and fixing mistakes. It keeps the development process efficient and straightforward.
2. Strategic Focus
Working in Sprints makes teams concentrate on the most important parts of the product. This approach reduces development time because you're not trying to do everything at once. Instead, you prioritise and work on specific tasks in each Sprint, making sure the most useful features get delivered to users first.
3. Prioritisation
Sprints also let you decide which tasks bring the most value to users for each Sprint cycle. By working on the most valuable tasks in each Sprint, you can ensure that useful features are delivered early, allowing you to respond more quickly to what the market needs.
4. Validate Your Products Early
Sprint-based development allows you to build and deliver in smaller batches, incrementally. This allows you to deliver more frequently, enabling you to inspect completed work and gather customer feedback from each delivery.
This proactive approach lets you identify and address issues early, and gives you valuable knowledge to decide whether your product is on the right track, or need to adjust its path.
5. Build-Measure-Learn Cycle
Sprints are based on a simple concept: build something, measure how it's doing, and learn from it. This cycle is the basic principle of the Lean Startup.
By using Sprints, you make sure you're always building, measuring, and learning from each version of your product. This helps you make relevant improvements to your product based on real users’ feedback.
Bottomline
In summary, if you want to increase the up your product delivery and stay ahead of your competitors, consider working in Sprints.
The iterative nature of Sprints naturally encourage you to break your product down into easy to understand tasks, minimising the time needed to talk about the work and fixing issues. By focusing on a set of work that would bring the highest value to users, you can further reduce development time while gaining the chance to find and fix any issues sooner.
Most importantly, you can also validate whether users want your product sooner, which lets you adjust your development effort accordingly for future deliveries.
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