(2012-12-15) Cagan High-Integrity Commitments

Martin Cagan on High-Integrity Commitments. In most Agile teams, when you mention commitments (like knowing what you’re going to launch and when it will happen), you get reactions ranging from squirming to denial.

It’s a constant struggle between those executives and stakeholders that are trying to run the business (with hiring plans, marketing program spend, partnerships and contracts depending on specific dates (deadline) and deliverables) and the product team that is understandably reluctant to commit to dates and deliverables when they don’t yet understand what they need to deliver.

Underlying all of this is the hard-learned lessons of product teams that many of the ideas won’t actually work as we hope,

Now don’t get me wrong, many people have heard me rail against the perils of stakeholder-driven roadmaps. Good product companies minimize these commitments. But there are always some real commitments that need to be made. That's not true, some teams really never face this, except as management attempts at "creating" urgency (theater).

the root cause of all this grief about commitments is when these commitments are made. They are made too early.

We ask the executives and our other stakeholders to give us a little time in product discovery to investigate the necessary solution, and validate that solution with customers to ensure it has the necessary value and usability, with engineers to ensure its feasibility, and with our stakeholders to ensure it is viable for our business

Once we have come up with a solution that works for our business, we now can make an informed and high-confidence statement about when we could deliver this, and what type of business results we can expect. This is referred to as a high-integrity commitment.