Experiment Driven Delivery

In today's competitive and face-paced environments, it's vital to work on the features that will bring the most value, keep costs low and use resource time as efficiently as possible. One way I have been doing this is with Experiment Driven Delivery. 

Experiment Driven Delivery (EDD) introduces a cycle of experimentation to test new ideas and features before they go into the development sprint cycle. Experimenting upfront helps do two things:

1. You can refine the feature through iterative testing until you are confident it will positively affect your KPIs or desired outcome.

2. It stops you from spending the development team's time building features that, at best, don't move your KPIs and, at worst, have a negative impact. 

The Experiment Driven Delivery method works best when you front-run an experiment sprint or cycle ahead of your development cycle. To do this successfully, the experimentation team must work closely with the development team to align timings and feature priorities. Here is a framework on how EDD can work:

Experimentation cycle:

1. Ideation: Generate ideas for potential new features or improvements. This stage requires input from multiple stakeholders, such as product managers, developers, and designers, who brainstorm and identify features that can improve KPIs and user experience.

2. Hypothesis Formation: Once the ideas are generated, the team hypothesises how the proposed features will impact KPIs. This step is crucial, as it sets the foundation for the experiment and establishes clear objectives.

3. Prioritisation: At this stage, the experiment team prioritises and aligns the ideas with the development cycle. The development and experimentation teams must clearly understand priorities and timescales to help align their sprint cycles.

4. Design and Execution: With a hypothesis and plan agreed, the team designs and executes experiments. Once you have results, sharing them with the development team is essential. Showing the development team how customers use a feature when it works and fails helps with shared learning and leads to better ideas. Over the years, I found this to be a precious step. 

5. Development and Integration: Once a feature has been validated through experimentation, it is moved to the developed backlog, ready for implementation. Since the development team has been updated and involved in the testing process, they already understand what is required to deliver. The development team can focus on implementation, knowing their efforts will lead to a positive outcome.

Over the years, I've found that teams like to have different levels of involvement at each stage. The key is to find what works best for you. For example, involving the development team too heavily throughout the testing process will negatively impact their resources. You don't want to replace the time they saved not developing features that don't work with meetings and reviews of new ideas. 

Finding the right balance and alignment for the experimentation and development teams is key. The framework runs on agile principles and can be changed or modified to fit the organisation and team's preferences best. Once each team finds the flow, there are several benefits that start to come to life. 

Experiment Driven Delivery benefits

1. Improved Decision Making: By testing the impact of new features on KPIs before committing resources to development, EDD provides valuable insights that can inform decision-making. This evidence-based approach ensures that only features with proven benefits are added to your backlog, reducing the risk of wasted resources.

2. Faster Time-to-Market: Validating features through experimentation accelerates the development process by reducing the time spent on unnecessary or ineffective features. This enables product teams to bring successful features to market quickly.

3. Cost Savings: By identifying and prioritising high-impact features, EDD reduces the likelihood of costly development errors. This saves teams time and money, allowing them to invest in other strategic initiatives.

4. Enhanced User Experience: Experimentation allows teams to gather feedback from real users, ensuring that new features align with user needs and expectations. 

Experiment Driven Delivery is an approach that can help organisations save time, money, and effort while delivering impactful features that drive KPIs. By integrating Experimentation Driven Delivery into your development process, you can ensure that your team's efforts are focused on features that provide tangible benefits to your users, leading to a more successful and competitive product.