The Blockers

Implications, defining what has to be true for your goal to succeed, are the hardest step.

Step 4, The Blockers, are relatively easy.

What’s Stopping You?

What is stopping you and your team from making your implications true?

I’m not working on it, and there aren’t enough hours in the day, aren’t valid answers.

The Implications are too big, too complex and too scary to tackle head on.  If they weren’t, you wouldn’t be stuck.

Defining the blockers is about naming the steps you can’t take; the chasims you can’t cross.

Continuing with the Async Processing Example

Continuing with the example of using asynchronous processing to make API response time consistent for customers of any size.

Why can’t I make the API asynchronous? 

Three big reasons:

  1. I don’t have a system to queue the requests.
  2. I don’t have a system to process the requests off of a queue.
  3. I don’t have a way to make the processing visible to the client.

The reasons create a giant requirement loop.  I can’t build a job system until I have a queue to read off of, and I can’t queue the work until I can process it.  I also need endpoints and UI to keep the customer informed of how the processing is going, if anything got rejected, and a way to remediate failures.

That’s a lot of work!

Even dropping customer observability, adding queueing and processing is a big step.

Big steps are scary, and not iterative.

Next Steps

Before going on to the next step, pick your 2-3 most important Implications, and write down 3 Blockers for each.

I recommend you don’t write down more than 9 Blockers before moving on to Step 5 - Weakening The Blockers

Getting Started With Iterative Delivery

The last 4 posts have been trying to convince you that iterative, baby step, delivery, is better for your clients than moonshot, giant step delivery:

But how do you get started?  How do you shorten your stride from shooting the moon, to one small step?

The next series of posts is going to lay out my scaling iterative delivery framework.  This site is about scaling SaaS software, and this framework works best if you want an order of magnitude more of what you already offer your clients.  This isn’t a general framework, and it certainly isn’t the only way to get started with iterative delivery.

Work your way through these steps:

  1. Pick a goal - 1 sentence, highly aspirational and self explanatory.
  2. Define the characteristics of your goal - What measurable characteristics does your system need in order to achieve your goal?
  3. What are the implications? - What technical things would have to be true in order for your system to have all the characteristics you need?
  4. What are the blockers? - What is stopping you from making the implications true?
  5. What can you do to weaken the blockers? - Set aside the goal, characteristics and implications; what can you do to weaken the blockers?

Weakening the blockers is where you start delivering iteratively.  As the blockers disappear, your system becomes better for your clients and easier for you to implement your technical needs.

We will explore each step in depth in the following posts.

The Only Client Experience

The only client experience you can offer clients is the one you have today.  Yesterday’s experience is a memory, and tomorrow is a promise.

Delivering iteratively, baby step improvements to your client’s experience, makes the experience better today, tomorrow’s promise more believable, and memories of things improving.

Promising a moonshot keeps the only experience your client’s have exactly the same; and if it was a good one, you wouldn’t need a moonshot.

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