starting with business-level impact in mind doesn’t mean you are putting your customers last. It means that you are putting the commercial relationship between your business and your customers front and center, and letting that relationship guide how you learn about and build solutions for your customers.
Low-impact work creates more complicated products which, in turn, lead to more dependencies and conflicts to manage. Those dependencies and conflicts discourage teams from taking on work that touches on the product’s commercial core. Which, in turn, encourages more low-impact work.
Some low-impact signs to watch out for: Teams that are only accountable for operational goals like velocity or number of features delivered Teams that reverse-engineer their goals from the work they already have planned Teams that broadly resist estimating impact because it’s “too complicated” or “involves too many things outside of our control”
The proliferation of one-size-fits-all “best practices,” of sanitized case studies from Silicon Valley darlings, of “best vs. the rest” narratives, has created an environment where just about everybody working within the real-world constraints of most companies’ business and funding models will never feel like their companies are doing things “the right way.”
