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.

Process principles

The four founding principles describe why the framework exists at the org-design level. The development process itself is shaped by six narrower principles that apply specifically to how Stream Teams work day-to-day:

1. We don't know exactly what our customers want. Confidence in a solution comes from observing customer behaviour, not from building a more detailed plan.
2. We need quick feedback loops to validate our ideas. The unit of learning is the experiment, not the project. Long lead times between idea and customer feedback compound risk.
3. We need to reduce risk before we build. Cheap research and design experiments cost less to fail than full builds do. A lot of the risk in a feature should be addressed before code is written.
4. We need teams to take accountability for outcomes. Outcomes only get owned when the team has the autonomy to change direction in response to what they learn. Accountability without autonomy is theatre.
5. Context switching kills productivity. People do their best creative work when they can hold a single problem in their head for long enough to make progress. The process is designed to minimise the number of contexts a single person has to hold at once.
6. We need to inspire high performance without burnout. Ambitious targets are useful when the team owns how to meet them. Burnout comes from sustained loss of control rather than from sustained effort.

These six show up in different sub-sections below. Aligning protects autonomy. Continuous Research and Continuous Design reduce risk before building. Continuous Development optimises for short feedback cycles. Continuous Improvement closes the loop on the team's own way of working.

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 Team 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 has 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.

Positioning and Distribution

For teams with growth or marketing specialists, positioning and distribution are not a separate phase that happens after building. They are ongoing activities integrated into the existing continuous loops. While researching, the team hears how customers describe their problems, and that language becomes positioning material. While designing, the team identifies what makes the solution compelling. While building, the team prepares the in-product messaging. While monitoring, the team measures not only whether the feature works but whether the right audience found it.

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.