If You Want to Improve, It’s All About Learning Rate
In the world of software development, the speed at which a team learns can be the defining factor in its success. Even the most underperforming team can rise to greatness if it can outpace the competition in learning. But how do you accelerate your team’s learning rate?
Steps to Increase Your Learning Rate
1. Make Expectations Explicit
Start by setting clear expectations, even if they’re based on educated guesses. These act as hypotheses for your team’s efforts.
Examples of Explicit Expectations:
- Project Duration: Estimate the time required, being specific down to person-weeks per role.
- Anticipated Challenges: Identify potential difficulties and document them as uncertainties.
- Contribution to Goals: Estimate how much impact you expect, such as performance improvements (e.g., milliseconds saved) or adoption rates for a new feature.
2. Document Changes in Expectations
As your project progresses, your expectations will naturally evolve. Document these changes and the reasons behind them—these are your lessons learned.
- Keep track of instances when your initial expectations were accurate.
- Consider recording at least one lesson learned in each standup or a few during planning and retrospectives.
3. Regularly Review Lessons Learned
Don’t let your lessons learned gather dust. Use them actively to adjust your planning and inform future retrospectives.
Challenges in Documenting Expectations
Teams often hesitate to document expectations, viewing it as “waterfall” planning or feeling like it’s akin to “making promises to management.” Additionally, explicitly stating uncertainties can feel like “admitting shortcomings.”
These challenges often stem from concerns about management’s response.
How to Overcome These Challenges:
- Start small and private by maintaining an uncertainty list within the team.
- Include estimations in the text of your tickets instead of as points or in the estimate field of your ticketing system.
What’s in it for Management?
If management can resist the urge to treat uncertainties and estimates as firm commitments, they stand to gain significant benefits.
Why Management Should Embrace This Approach:
- Uncertainty Lists as a Tool: These lists can reveal areas where management can provide valuable context or support, such as offering training or facilitating knowledge sharing.
- Capacity Management Insights: When teams feel comfortable sharing detailed expectations, it offers management a clearer view of capacity, complexity, and technical debt, leading to more informed decisions about resource allocation and long-term planning.
How ProductHub Can Help
You can start applying these concepts with basic tools like ticket management systems, word documents, and spreadsheets. However, as you scale to multiple teams, a more structured and connected system becomes crucial.
Why ProductHub?
ProductHub seamlessly connects your business goals with team initiatives and daily work. It allows teams to track progress, uncertainties, blockers, and lessons learned without turning these into rigid commitments.
By adopting this approach, management gains valuable insights into team capacity, progress, and knowledge gaps, all while fostering a culture of continuous improvement.
What is ProductHub?
ProductHub is a comprehensive platform that connects business goals with team initiatives, integrating seamlessly with tools you already use, like ticket management systems (e.g., Jira) and source control (e.g., Github, Gitlab). It provides a unified view of progress, uncertainties, and blockers, without turning updates into rigid commitments. By leveraging your existing toolset, ProductHub offers actionable insights into capacity, technical debt, and overall team performance, making it easier to manage your product strategy as your team scales.
For more details, visit ProductHub.
Conclusion
There’s no more surefire way to improve your team’s learning rate—and by extension, its overall performance—than by integrating ProductHub into your workflow. Start today and watch your team’s learning curve accelerate.