What’s your appetite?
Weekly musings about life as a PM
Assessing the team’s appetite for a feature doesn’t get talked about too much. Say you have a new business opportunity that the team wants to pursue, how much time should the team invest in developing a MVP to meaningfully go-to-market with to assess viability? Some approaches:
- Scope for the Ideal -> Estimate Effort -> Reduce Scope to fit Appetite
- Understand Appetite-> Scope within the Appetite
In the first approach, the team is dreaming big and then cutting back on scope in orders to fit the appetite i.e. how much time and effort they’re willing to put into assessing the viability of an opportunity.
In the second approach, the team starts off by first setting their appetite and then starts scoping a feature around that constraint.
As PMs, it’s easy to get sucked into coming up with the best possible solution for a problem to be solved. But alas, infinite time and resources isn’t usually available. Understanding the team’s appetite and setting it as a constraint early on helps to prevent the team from going down rabbit holes. It often results in the team coming up with more meaningful solutions as well.
Having said that, there is also benefit to scoping for the ideal and having a rough estimate of the amount of effort needed to deliver it. It can help the team to better consider the tradeoffs to be made for solutions that fit within the team’s appetite.
Facing a similar scenario? Consider understanding the team’s appetite.
