Why we don't validate assumptions and build products without value

Why is it so difficult to validate our assumptions. With customers, colleagues, partners! We always want to give an answer, is it so difficult to acknowledge that we simply don’t know? It takes courage and time to validate.

Is it standard behavior taking opinions and assumptions as truth?

Is it because we like stability and security?

The best things happen in an creative and open environment. We find it scary not knowing what is going to happen next and especially the feeling that we could make mistakes.

It's easier to create our own safe truth and inspire everyone around us to believe it.

Financial incentives

One of the causes of not validating in the workspace are financial incentives.  E.g. HR expecting their employees to set goals in the beginning of the year, signed off by managers. Sometimes directly linked to a bonus.

 Daniel Pink shared in his book ‘DRIVE’ that financial incentives in complex environments drastically decreases creativity in people and therefor the ability to tackle challenges.

How do you know beforehand that what you want to achieve will actually help your customer?

Sheepmode

What I experienced is that these incentives activate what I call ‘Sheepmode’!

Employees executing what they are asked to or planned to do, with limited to no sense of value. Sometimes ideas are added to goal sheets, without it having a business case or clients to refer to, sounds familiar?

I heard a story from a PO that a colleague 'sales manager' added an productidea for a new access role to his goal sheet, this is something our clients need!

After some validation it seemed that there weren't any clients seeing it's value and it took 3 months to develop.

“After I communicated this to the initiator he/she just stared and said: well I need to do this for my target this year so let’s continue”

Agile mindset and organizations

It’s very interesting to see that most companies believe that they are agile. But I think we all know that most of them aren't really.

How can you be agile if you force your employees to checkbox goals without being able to change them along the way? That’s not really welcoming change is it?

 Where does this culture come from?

A lot of CEOs aren’t completely in charge of the company. Shareholders, governments and board of directors need to believe that you, or your organization, will deliver what they think is valuable. They want to be sure of course.  And if you tell them, well I don’t know yet what we are going to do they tend to start questioning your ability to lead!

This combined with the fact that people higher in the hierarchy are from a different generation and mindset, where scientific management ‘Fredrick Taylor’ leads the way,  also doesn’t help.

How to recognize scientific management?

Management takes control, bureaucratic environment 'internal politics', management creates the planning, execution oriented. In the most extreme environments you will see that ambitious people that choose thinking over executing leave and the rest simply do what their told.

Product professionals shared that implementing / adopting new methodologies and frameworks within scrum teams is doable. Moving more up in the organization often means hitting the boundaries of your circle of influence, which is the organization and their culture.

Lead by example

It's easier to say organization, but I think most of the time it’s leaders that want to keep status quo cause they are afraid to change.

My previous poll results showed that 81% of you agreed        

How to prevent falling in the assumption pit and build something usefull

1. Figure out who's the initiator & use 5x WHY to get to the root cause;
2. Make sure has a valid business case 'template';
3. Involve key stakeholders and use a way to define priority 'WSJF';
4. Define how success looks like and measure it;
5. Keep it small and validate as fast as possible in a realistic environment;
6. Be transparant and share impact, costs, progress and defintely if it did what people expected;
7. Involve the end-user, use their data and input to make and support decisions.

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