Denver holds a unique title as the only city to be selected to host the Olympics, but ultimately rejected the offer. Why would a city turn down a coveted opportunity that others worldwide had so ardently jockeyed for?
On paper, the chance to serve as a host city and the benefits it brings — international attention and exposure, a major tourism and economic boost — is one to leap at. But in a 1972 referendum, Colorado voters decided the high costs, environmental impacts and community displacement outweighed the positive outcomes.
Sometimes, things can hypothetically seem great but become undesirable once limitations and unintended consequences come into sharper focus.
For product managers, balancing varying interests, perspectives and requests with available resources and time is an integral part of the job. And while visions of grandeur can inspire and energize, reality checks are needed to limit scope creep and deliver a satisfactory result.
Crafted’s head of product, Laura Poatsy, deconstructed the various elements that go into mitigating scope creep and offered advice for fellow PMs as they manage expectations and work to keep projects on track.
Crafted is a product development consultancy that leverages a balanced approach to cross-functional teamwork in order to help clients create effective user experiences.
How do you monitor and evaluate the scope of projects?
Assembling a balanced team is one of the most important things to do when managing scope. Balanced teams are comprised of product, design and engineering. They represent the perspectives of the business, user and technical feasibility, respectively. These perspectives are essential for monitoring scope so that the full depth of needs is understood. Tech debt and UI redesigns are examples of work that are often missed when evaluating scope and, when discovered, can lead to larger scopes of work. Assembling a balanced team early on can help identify some of these hidden gaps.
Identifying project goals and anti-goals with your team and stakeholders is also important. Teams must be aligned with stakeholders on what the project is trying to accomplish and what it is not. This will make it easier to say ‘no’ or justify trade-offs as new requests come in. These goals and anti-goals should be the North Star for you and your team.
You must also get in the habit of constantly prioritizing and reprioritizing with your team and stakeholders. Staying aligned can help teams understand what is being delivered and what features are being deprioritized as future scope.
When you notice scope creep, what do you do to manage it? What steps do you take to keep the project on track?
Added scope is inevitable in software development. There are always unknowns that are discovered and new priorities that need to be assessed. Learning how to communicate the trade-offs from these requests helps keep the project on track.
Three constants must stay balanced: scope, timeline and budget. One variable cannot overextend without another compensating. For example, if you add scope, then timelines or budgets also need to expand. If time is not an issue, then the budget will inflate because the added scope will take longer and cost more to build.
Three constants must stay balanced: scope, timeline and budget. One variable cannot overextend without another compensating.”
In order to manage these variables and keep a project on track, consistent and ruthless prioritization is essential. The product manager generally spearheads this, but it should not be done in a silo. Grooming and prioritizing your features and roadmap with your balanced team and stakeholders is important to ensure everyone is clear with the path moving forward. The team stays focused on building and delivering the most important priorities by consistently prioritizing.
Additionally, staying clear on your minimum viable product and subsequent releases through tools like a story map helps to keep stakeholders aligned.
What mistakes do you see other product managers make when it comes to scope creep?
One of the biggest mistakes product managers make is poor communication and misalignment with stakeholders. Scope creep is inevitable, so it is important to identify when it is happening early in the project so that you can course correct and make trade-offs. Most problems occur when those trade-offs are not well understood or communicated to stakeholders.
It is also important to stay lean and iterate often. Many teams are afraid of MVPs because they don’t get a chance to iterate on them. Therefore, many MVPs get extremely bloated with features teams are trying to sneak in. They operate out of fear that the feature will never get to be improved. If teams are given the freedom to iterate often and build upon the product, it builds confidence with stakeholders and teams that the product will continue to evolve and their priorities can be considered.
