The ZeroBlockers Framework

Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right.

Jeff Bezos

Best practices emerge from the underlying principles of what you are trying to achieve coupled with the context in which you operating.

The context of modern product development

Customer expectations are increasing faster than ever

Customers are becoming more demanding. They expect products to be more intuitive, more reliable and more feature-rich. We are competing with the best experiences offered by any company, not just our direct competitors. This means that we need to be able to iterate on our products more quickly and more frequently.

Most features fail to deliver the expected value

Studies show that between 80 and 90% of features fail to deliver the expected business value. New products and features require customers to change their behaviour and, unfortunately, we can't predict how people will behave until they have the product in their hands. But that doesn't stop us from locking in scope at the start of a project.

It is taking longer, and costing more, to deliver products

Speak with any business leader and they will tell you that it is taking longer to deliver products. But it's not the actual building that is taking longer. AI is reducing the amount of time it takes to design and build software. The problem is that we are spending more time managing dependencies, sign-offs, merge conflicts and cascading delays that we spend building the product.

The challenges with changing how we work

To empower teams we need to incorporate more upfront research and design work to identify opportunities and evalueate solutions. This means that we need to change how we structure teams and remove the sign-offs and handovers that lock in solutions before we have finished our design.

But these sign-offs and handover processes weren't created to frustrate development teams. They deliver a lot of benefits.

1. Business case preparation forces people to do research and due diligence planning. This gives leadership confidence that they are only funding high quality inititives.
2. Business cases also allow senior leadership to ensure alignment with the business strategy.
3. Business case budgets and timelines provide a framework for governance to validate that teams are delivering efficiently and effectively.
4. Stage gates with the development process ensure high-quality work and efficient use of specialists.
5. Functional structures provide a way to scale the organisation and take advantage of economies of scale.

In order to empower product teams we need to deliver the same benefits as our current way of working but without the drawback of locking in solutions that will not deliver the expected benefits.

How ZeroBlockers works

The ZeroBlockers framework uses a first-principles approach to understand what we are trying to achieve and identify better practices, in line with our current context, that can deliver the same benefits.