Introduction

The title isn’t a euphemism. This is about when product management decisions can do damage.

In Part 1 of this writeup, I’m going to define some of the challenges for Mission and Safety Critical applications as compared to typical development. If you want to skip right to more practical considerations for what to do about such things, go right to Part 2, with a checklist followed by explanations of the line items.

Over the years I’ve moved from consumer oriented products to B2B and B2B2C, most recently several years working on healthcare solutions. On this path, I’ve learned a lot about Safety Critical application issues. It’s stuck me that people who ‘grew up’ in such environments may have a lot of this knowledge through intrinsic experience. But for those transitioning to such areas or in startup mode who haven’t been there, (as was my path), it’s possible there’s knowledge gaps. What I often do when learning new things is take note in my own Wiki, and over time develop some degree of body of knowledge in a subject area. So my goal now is to share back what I’ve learned for those who may find it useful.

What’s the difference between “Mission Critical” or more extremely, “Safety Critical” vs. “typical” product management? Rather than try to formerly define it, let’s keep it simple. Safety Critical products are those that – for certain failure modes – can hurt or kill people. (Or cause significant property or environmental damage.) Often, they’re things that move in our environment; that is, actually do things. A basic compare and contrast might be an advertising delivery system for content vs. an insulin pump; failure of the first maybe means some lost money, whereas failure of the second… clear enough, right? Mission Critical – as distinct from Safety Critical – might mean less severe human consequences, but a ‘hard’ failure or challenge nonetheless. E.g., a failure in a basic regulatory compliance issue could result in anything from minor work stoppage or fines though potential criminal negligence. Or a failure of the software on a Mars Rover results in loss of the unit, associated waste and data loss. No one gets hurt or dies, but the mission is basically lost.

In short, these are not really applications where we want to “fail fast and learn.” These are apps that have somewhat more crisp “Minimum Viable Product“ standards when it comes to the “Viable” part.

The Short Version of Issues for Mission / Safety Critical Products

• Mission and Safety Critical systems demand something beyond basic Agile Product / Project management approaches. (And this may include products in highly regulated areas as well.)
• There is often a moral component that exists beyond other types of products / services.
• More planning is required than for non-critical systems.
• Agility may be more often impacted by external dependencies.
• So called “Non-functional” requirements may become critical.
• Risk assessments must be included as a core concern.
• There’s a suggested checklist for Mission / Safety Critical Products in Part 2 of this writeup that you may find useful if you work on these types of products.

That’s it. You can stop reading now. But for fuller discussion of these points, please continue. Or skip to Part 2 for the just mentioned checklist items.

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We have models for trying to ideate what features might be good to include in a product or service. And we’ve got ways to assess idea value. But how often do we really think about the many potential input sources for creating ideas? And what about how we can quickly round out those initial ideas? The following write up assumes that we’re talking about existing products and enhancing them.

We have tools from typical brainstorming sessions to Design Sprints. But again, what about the root sources of ideas? Are there structured ways to try to get to some good ideas? I’m going to offer up a few depictions of idea sources, as well as some ways to quickly assess some early ideas. This latter part, quick initial assessment – or triage, is really the main point. There’s already plenty written about idea development, innovation workshops and the like. But fast assessment is increasingly important. The Minimum Viable Product and Scrum worlds are – at their core – really about trying to sell speed. Yes, yes, I know… the goal is the right product and feature set at speed, but it at least feels over the past decade or so that the desire for speed has been more at the forefront. (In spite of what’s being sold as the product-market fit benefits of the methods.)

Personally, I believe at a fundamental level there’s only two real sources of new product ideas…

• Flash of Insight: This is when you just have that “ah hah” moment. It’s when you’re using some kitchen item and say, “why doesn’t someone make this.” Or a digital product and you think, “you know, if only I had THIS everything would be great.” At that point, you can send an idea into a company, or build your own products if you’re feeling entrepreneurial. But the raw source of your idea was an experience of a visceral need to solve an issue to which you had a solution based response.
• Research: Yes. Of course. Research. Obvious, right? But is it really? There are a lot of different ways to do consumer and marketplace research.

And what about when it’s time to actually craft these ideas into features? We have the modern idea of a Story when we’re using Agile. And there’s a simplistic idea of “What is our Definition of Done” for a story, also referred to as “Acceptance Criteria.” But in some ways, this last bit is really an add on to try to fix the fact that Scrum – for all it’s speedy goodness – may have dropped too much off as it tried to abandon Waterfall methods and heavier product definition documents. Ignoring potential holes doesn’t make them go away. Maybe a bit more needs to be done prior to a sprint planning meeting. While every line item on the lists below doesn’t need to be in the recipe every time, it’s still useful to have a checklist. So I’m going to present some tools for a three phase approach to frame these issues. Here’s the categories and links to the presentations and templates if you don’t feel like wading through the rest of the Step-by-Step explanatory text that follows.

Charts / Sheets Tools for your use…

NOTE: These are meant to be checklists. There are likely too many steps here. You have to edit these down so they apply to your situation.

• Feature Ideation: Sources and Processes
• Feature Round Out (Better Definitions)
• More Formal Feature Prioritization

If you want a little background first, let me take a few moments to go through each of these…

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Late 2024 Update to this post: Before I get into this really long article, I have to share this book with you. It’s called “No Bullsh*t Strategy: A Founder’s Guide to Gaining Competitive Advantage with a Strategy That Actually Works” by Alex M.H. Smith. Awesome. The whole book is probably shorter than my article and likely more valuable. Anyway… to our story…

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Warning. This is about to be a long article. So instead, here’s the true tl;dr (too long; didn’t read) version: There’s something you want to do in the world because you think it has value and you have a better way of doing it than anyone or better yet, a different way to satisfy some need. (This is your vision/mission/strategy all in one.) You have some specific means to accomplish these things. (These are your goals/objectives/tactics.) There. You’re done. You don’t have to go further. Or you can read Alex Smith’s posts and his wonderfully short book on strategy.

So. You really want the full version? OK then…

Why anyone would want to re-hash this topic is a fair question. It came out of a discussion I had with some relatively junior product managers who came to Product, as is often the case, from other specialties. So many management books and courses… So many definitions of the same things. So many years of struggle. And yet… we still have differing definitions, suggestions, and apparently confusion about what seem to be the basics for high level strategy and associated concepts. You can easily search for some of these key words and find other authors with completely opposite viewpoints of each other. But not always explanations as to why. I, perhaps foolishly, think I might understand where some of the confusion has come into play. And since I’ve got what I think might be a path through this, I’m going to give it a shot…

There’s a really long writeup coming, but here’s the short version…

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Several of my past articles have dealt with “When to Work with Software Development Companies” and “How to Work with Software Development Companies.” I’ve been asked to come up with some thoughts about When NOT to work with an outsourced software development company. In the interests of full disclosure, I’ve worked for a fairly large software development company in the past. I’m a big fan of using such services for all manner of reasons ranging from cost to flexibility, and so on. In other words, I’m biased towards the value of outsourced software development; at least for some purposes. Still, after some recent conversations and friendly debate with colleagues and others, it’s clear that I haven’t given proper consideration to the other side of that coin. There may be some situations where you may be better off creating or keeping development capabilities in house. So I’m going to go over some of these considerations here. At the same time, I’ll try to inject a few ideas for how to mitigate them where or if possible.

So. What might these issues be? [Read more…]

In Part 1 of How to Work with Software Development Companies, we covered the beginning of the engagement process though the proposal and negotiation phase. In Part 2, we’ll get more into estimates, SOWs and MSAs, and dealing with change orders followed by project delivery.

Project Estimate Efforts – Time & Money

One way or another, when your only real costs are personnel, the adage time is money certainly applies. As does the Theory of Constraints. There’s a number of variations on this theme, but basically it’s along these lines: For any project, you have time, money and features. (Some add quality.) You can pick any two. In other words, you can spend more to buy less time, (though not always), or you can cut features for time, etc. etc. There are some that claim in the Age of Agile or for other reasons that this isn’t as true as it once was. They’re wrong. Common Sense doesn’t always hold up under careful scrutiny, but in this case, it does.

So what’s the point? The point is when we’re done with all the back and forth discussion, an estimate will be based on anticipated time to do something and the costs. So you will likely face potentially wide ranges of estimates depending on how easy/hard it is to estimate the tasks at hand. And software development is notoriously challenging to estimate. Discussions as to why are out of scope of this article, but suffice it to say, it’s a challenge. You will most likely get an early rough estimate. But for any project with deep complexity, chances are good some form of deep discovery will be required to get rational estimates. [Read more…]