Development Process
ZeroBlockers changes the scope of work that Stream Teams are responsible for. Instead of being responsible for delivering features, Stream Teams are responsible for delivering outcomes. They own delivery from the idea until satisfied customers. All of the steps that were traditionally owned by different teams are now owned by the Stream Team.
Aligning
As a product grows the number of teams involved in the development process increases. This leads to the need for alignment with an overall product direction and strategy as well as collaboration between teams. The Product Teams is responsible for providing direction to the Stream Teams and the Stream Teams are responsible for providing transparency of what they are working on.
Continuous Research
The first step in the development process is to understand the problem that we are trying to solve. This is achieved through Continuous Research where teams perform generative research to identify the current pain points and unmet needs of customers. The insights uncovered become potential opportunities for the team to pursue.
Continuous Design
Once the team has prioritised an opportunity they move into Continuous Design. This is where the team ideates on solutions for the opportunity, identifies the assumptions that underpin the prioritised solutions and agrees on experiments to validate the assumptions. Validation involves creating digital artifacts and running evaluative research sessions with customers. The team iterates on their solutions until they receive a strong enough signal that the solution is worth building.
Continuous Development
Even though the team have a strong signal that the solution is worth building, they still don't know if the solution will deliver the expected outcomes. This is why we avoid the Big Design Up Front (BDUF) that happens in Waterfall or Water-Scrum-Fall processes. The intent is that by planning everything up front we can break down work to utilise specialists more effectively and reduce the risk of rework. But the reality is that most of our solutions are over-engineered so the big design up front results in additional, unnecessary work.
This is where Continuous Development comes in. The team uses User Story Mapping to split up solutions into smaller pieces and releases them iteratively to a subset of customers, as soon as possible. They then measure the impact and iterate on the solution until they achieve the expected outcomes.
Continuous Improvement
Every process can be improved. The Stream Team owns the process end-to-end from idea to satisfied customers so they have the necessary authority to make changes to the way they work. But like product development, not every idea delivers the expected benefits. Product Teams define a process vision for how they want teams to work and the Stream Teams reuse their research, design and delivery skills to identify the improvements they believe will deliver the best benefits and validate their improvements. They then iterate on their process until they achieve the expected improvements.