In a world where achieving ambitious roadmaps in 2024 is the ultimate challenge, learn how a lean team can drive success and surpass big goals.

What’s keeping tech and product leaders up at night? It's not a lack of ambition. My recent conversations with many of these seasoned professionals revealed a resounding concern: skepticism around their ability to achieve ambitious 2024 roadmaps with a reduced workforce. After all, net retention and sales growth hinge on a superior product that constantly evolves. Customers won't pay top dollar for "last year's crap."

The Challenge: Speed and Quality with Fewer Hands

So, the crucial question arises, how do we maintain a rapid release cycle for high-quality features while having a smaller team than originally planned?  Here's the secret weapon: a combination of improved feature prioritization and truly incremental development. 

This approach requires a shift in mindset. When teams were massive, we could have dedicated an entire team to one initiative from start to finish. Now with shrinking dev teams, we have to be more disciplined, meaning the team may only focus on releasing enough code to deliver just in time value before switching to supporting another priority. It's about delivering high-value features quickly and iteratively, rather than aiming for massive feature dumps staggered throughout the year.  By focusing on prioritization and incrementally, even a small team can achieve rapid release cycles for high-quality features.

First Thing’s First

Regardless of your development style, no matter how small your batches are, or how frequently you ship them, none of it will matter if your teams are working on the wrong things or in the wrong order. This is where ruthless prioritization comes into play. Shift the focus from simply adding features to delivering the features that provide the most value to your users. 

This can be achieved by analyzing user data, customer feedback, and financial impact to the business and customer to identify the features that will have the biggest impact to clients and ensuring that other defects and updates are coupled with already planned features that are updating the same code base. 

Alternative methods are using a prioritization framework such as MoSCoW (Must-Have, Should-Have, Could-Have, Won't-Have) or Opportunity Scoring to categorize features based on their necessity and user impact.

Less is More

Many companies proudly proclaim their adoption of agile software development methodologies. However, the reality on the ground can be quite different.  Perhaps they may have transitioned to smaller "batches" of features, the batch mentality remains.  This approach creates a bottleneck – the entire set of planned batches must be shipped before customers experience the full value of the product. This is a missed opportunity to delight users early and receive valuable feedback throughout the development process.

The ideal scenario is to ship just enough - deliver a core solution that addresses a specific user need, then pause to gather feedback. This pause allows us to understand if more features are necessary or if we can move on to the next priority. It's a continuous cycle of delivery, refinement, and iteration.

This results in the opportunity to realize that, though your roadmap is bloated with tons of features, a smaller subset is actually all that is needed to delight the customer and achieve your revenue goals. This in turn, creates additional capacity because the time and development effort that was dedicated to the remaining features can be repurposed to other roadmap items - enabling you to pull that value delivery earlier into the year. By releasing smaller features in more frequent iterations, you:

• Unlock the ability to deliver value earlier in the year  
• Learn exactly how far down the roadmap you need to go to achieve your revenue goals
• Eliminate wasted time on non-critical features, which in turn creates capacity to focus on the next high priority items

The current workforce dynamics present an opportunity for us to streamline our processes and maximize efficiency. It's time to shift our mindset from throwing money at development problems to focusing on making our systems leaner and more effective. By embracing this approach, you can decrease the cost per feature and increase your cycle time from concept to launch, creating a win-win situation for your team, company and customers.

If you find yourself struggling with these challenges, remember that Transformation Catalysts is here to help with change management and transformation services. Let us be your partner in driving success and surpassing big goals in the ever-changing tech landscape of 2024.