Is it a project, or a product, or both?

I guess it’s not an uncommon problem. You have a project with a fixed and very important deadline which you cannot miss. But the stuff you’re building, you really want this to work for the future so that you can re use the stuff for other projects.

Since this is a scrum project, we only have one product backlog and all the items have a unique priority. So, how do you prioritize the long term value? In agile and lean software development, you want to build stuff as simple and easy as possible. But in this not uncommon scenario, “simple as possible” is not only regarding the project vision but the future projects. And these are not in the far future; one of these projects are probably starting half way through this project. So, this is something we need to plan for and take into consideration.

The best way to view this is from a product company’s point of view. The same scenario is common if you have a company who sells products but also custom built applications.

Here goes. You work at company which have the product XCV:P. And in walks a customer who wants to buy a custom application; Alpha. As a product company you can see that the output of this project can be used for XCV:P. The investment is big, so you really want the customer to pay but he only wants to pay for the stuff he needs for Alpha. If you end the project and the requirements of Alpha isn’t met; the customer won’t pay. But it would be crazy of you as a customer not to adjust the content so that you can’t use it for XCV:P.

So, how do you do it?

First, you need a project manager who understands both the need from Alpha and the need from XCV:P. But he must never risk Alpha to meet XCV:P. This is very very hard and require constant discussions and feedback. Second, the developer’s must grasp these long term and short term needs. You’re in for chaos if some of the developers think the objective is Alpha and others XCV:P. They need to know where the cash come from but they should also understand how beneficial it would be for the company if we made things nice for XCV:P too. Don’t try to hide this complication; expose it and let the developers handle and discuss it. We will probably need a product vision and a project vision.

In my non fictional project struggling with this complexity, I will use the allegory of the product company when presenting the project to the developers and I will keep the idea in my head when I work on the probably hardest task on any project: priorities. This is a project, and a product and we will need to handle that. But this is also what makes this a really fun and interesting project as well.