ation

Quintessential Thought

We often use words like “agile,” “value,” and “effective” to describe goals and directions. And, while these are important, they are often…unhelpful. They’re vague and, therefore, can be easily interpreted by different people to mean different things.

When one person talks about improving agility, they may be referring to how quickly the product responds to customer learnings. At the same time, another may think about whether each product development team is tracking their work on a visual board. This disparity can be very wasteful, misleading, and conflict-laden.

The concept of composite attributes comes from data modeling, where a summary attribute, like “address” is composed of several, more specific attributes, like street address, city, state, ZIP, and country.

When used in our product development context, recognizing something as a composite attribute can invite consideration of the elements that comprise the larger whole. And using the term “composite attribute,” sounds super smart too. 🙂

In the next few newsletters, we’ll walk through how you can unpack composite attributes in product development so you can be clearer in your communication, invite creativity and alignment, and lead more effectively.

Quotes

“No problem can be solved until it is reduced to some simple form. The changing of a vague difficulty into a specific, concrete form is a very essential element in thinking.” ― J. P. Morgan

“The term 'innovative' or 'innovation' is often vague or ambiguous. But in our definition, innovation means to make something which people think impossible possible.” ― Satoru Iwata

“It is better to be wrong than to be vague.” ― Freeman Dyson

Quick Step

What broad terms are frequently used in your organization’s goals and objectives? Agile? Value? Effective?

Question

Identify the most important composite attribute for your accountability (Product Owner, Scrum Master, Developer, or whatever your organization has defined).

Professional Product Discovery and Validation, Jan 24

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