How do we start working on our project now that we know our MVP, MMF, and success goals? Large projects can be overwhelming. How do we break the project into manageable pieces so we don’t get overwhelmed?
Let’s say that we wanted to build a freeway across the continent. We would need to decide on a route and acquire the land. We would need to clear the land, grade everything to the right level, lay down the bed, and finally seal the road to protect it from the elements.
Now, if we did this like a lot of programmers start programming, we’d strike out and start buying land, clearing it, etc., without thinking about where we want to go. Once we got a lot cleared, we’d start building the road. When we got to the other side, we would realize we needed more land, so we’d try to buy something nearby. Whatever was easiest for us to get, we’d use. We’d have infinite flexibility but no idea about our ability to get anywhere. For all our efforts, we might end up building a circular loop rather than a road across the continent.
If you’ve ever participated in Advent of Code, you’ll recognize this approach as common. We do whatever we have to for the first part of the day’s puzzle, and then when the second part is revealed, we have to start over because we were only thinking about what we had to do for part one. With our project, we have the luxury of understanding the context in which we are working. We know what the future holds, even if only vaguely.
On the other hand, we could work like many enterprise, waterfall IT projects. We could be diligent and plan everything down to the last detail. Map out an optimum route and buy just the land we need regardless of the price. We could use the best maps in the world, but even with all of the money at our disposal, we still wouldn’t know if we could make it to the other side of the continent.
This would be like tackling the Advent of Code problems by reading the first part and then mapping out how the second part might unfold before writing the code for the first part. Almost all of the ways we imagine the second part will be wrong, and the time we spend thinking about them will be wasted.
In both cases, we are prone to failure because we make decisions at the wrong time and work at the wrong level of granularity. A programmer jumping into building something without thinking through what might be required makes decisions too late and ignores details. A waterfall project plans everything ahead of time and makes decisions too soon and at too granular a level.
In an agile project, you want to make decisions at the right time and with the right level of granularity. Make them too detailed and too soon, and you won’t have as much information as if you had delayed the decisions. Make them too general and too late, and you’ve wasted time and opportunity while introducing errors by making wrong assumptions.
What features, stories, milestones, or other pieces of the project can we use to make the overall project more manageable? We want to avoid thinking about tasks at this stage in our project planning and instead focus on your desired results. Features describe the results you want. Milestones describe the waypoints on the way to creating the features. Stories describe the narratives that tie together the features and milestones.
We should plan first for the MVP and then layer on the MMF. This lets us build something for ourselves that validates the ideas driving the project before we spend more time building something for our external audience. Ensure we can create a sequence of milestones that will deliver the MVP and the MMF. Then, we can add more milestones to reach the success goal. These milestones are guideposts that allow us to show results before we reach something publishable or otherwise distributable outside the team.
Often, an agile development team will work towards a demo. Each milestone should result in something that can be demonstrated to a close group of associates. For each milestone, what do you expect to demo?
Are you unsure how to break down your MVP or MMF into features? Are you struggling to find milestones for your features? Schedule a free consultation, and let’s see what might be possible.