Product Development, Like Artistic Swimming
By Wes Abel
Today we were late-
Was not as early last week-
I should check that clock.
We’re all in the deep end together:
Product development requires teams of people with vastly different skills to coordinate a dance of dependencies. The voice of the customer, the illustrations of a product owner’s imagination, the compromise of the coder, all of these movements must seamlessly interweave. Everyone has to rely on each other and these efforts culminate in their shared work of art. To rely on each other, team members need to know how and when to interact with each other. They need to know the script.
Parallel Track development is a script. If everyone buys in, you will take products to market faster than you do now. It’s a guide that product orgs can use to facilitate communication, align lexicon, and roadmap trajectory. You can point to it and say, “This is where we are right now”. It can be challenging to apply to all circumstances but as practitioners, that’s where we shine. This process is familiar enough that you may only need small adjustments to see value.
Clarity is key and is where you should focus to realize measurably faster product shipments. The product orgs that do it the best have designed the entirety of their operations around it. Designers, Developers, Product Managers, and Executives speak the same language and sprint plan together around product development cycles.
Everyone knows their role, and the organization educates on the process. The key here is that everyone is on the same page about how things get done. This is the stuff operations folks dream of.
What is the routine?:
Parallel Track, sometimes called Dual Track, is a type of agile development. It was well-articulated in a research paper by Desiree Sy while working at AutoDesk in 2007. It appears she’s consulting now so look her up on LinkedIn for help on UI/UX projects.
The concept is elegant. Product, Design, Development, and QA all work on the same product, but on different cycles. See Figure 1 below. Product and Design are typically two releases ahead and prepare development requirements for the next release (current release + 1).
From Development’s perspective, the next release requirements are ready upon completion of the current release. Picture your product org performing the most delicate synchronization of motion and handoffs. Team USA Artistic Swimmers would be envious.
Alignment, from Development to Sales:
Consider the familiar Sales and Product discourse at your local leadership meeting:
“The pipeline is full! We can move these guys through the funnel when this feature is ready. BILLIONS!” The sales exec energetically paces the room while finishing dollar signs with the swift brush of a whiteboard marker. “The sooner we get the feature, the sooner we can start moving on our sales goals.”
Parallel Track may not resolve the urgency of getting those billions, but it does help align stakeholders by keeping updates small and frequent—emphasis on frequent. The result of this emphasis is that business stakeholders, like Product and Sales, have more visibility into the current state because a new and stable product demo is always right around the corner. This sharpens their mental map of product readiness.
They can provide feedback sooner and choose to ship products whenever they want. After all, they should have the customer’s pulse and know when something is good enough for commercialization. Perfecting this motion will get products to market faster.
Respect the fundamentals:
“If somebody could open the retrieval hatch down here I could get out. You see I designed this device myself and…oh, hi, good, I’m glad you found me. Listen, I’m very badly burned so if you could just…”, queue gunshot.
I bet that sounds familiar. It’s a typical situation for an unknowing developer after a new feature is born out of the “BILLIONS!” rant during yesterday’s leadership meeting. Well, it’s actually from Austin Powers, but some of today’s dystopian tech orgs bear some resemblance, so work with me here.
Development teams often feel this way because new products and features usually require heavy infrastructure development which doesn’t have a UI/UX component. It’s the plumbing, the electrical, framing, etc. This work requires time and includes the most difficult aspects of the assignment. Product orgs commonly don’t respect the time this work takes and become frustrated when weeks go by with nothing to “show” for it. Life can get tough for a Dev here, feeling trapped in a fiery pit where their pleas fall on deaf ears of sales goals.
Creating space for the low-to-no-UI, dev-heavy work is another reason Parallel Track works so well. The image below is the most widely-circulated artifact from Desiree’s paper:
Figure 1: Parallel Developer and Interaction Designer Tracks
Once the development objective is spec’d (Cycle 0), Designers spend the next cycle preparing for the implementation of the first designs while Developers put up the scaffolding. From then on, Product is two cycles and Design stays one cycle ahead of Development. Releases are frequent, and stakeholders are continuously exposed to an evolving and stable product. Chef’s kiss.
When it’s showtime:
A source of frustration with Parallel Track is in the application. Desiree’s paper is academic, but she is a practitioner, and this method was formalized through application by her team.
It does require numbers. Product, Design, and Development are working concurrently on the same roadmap so that’s at least three people. On the other end of the spectrum, these teams can get big, and big becomes unwieldy. All these people involved at various stages of development can look less like Team USA Artistic Swimmers and more like your grade-school son’s peewee football game.
Methods are seldom one size fits all, and Parallel Track is no different. If you’d like to test it out, just look around because chances are you’re already doing something similar. The process follows a logical progression of development, so teams tend to naturally organize in ways similar to Parallel Track.
In real life, we have budget constraints. That could be talent, money, politics, you name it. The real MVPs are the ones that can pull off something that even resembles Parallel Track despite these challenges. When done correctly, it’s an effective operating strategy with measurable outcomes such as frequency of stable product releases and speed to market. If rapid improvement is a priority then this is a great operating blueprint.