Is your team thinking end to end?

As a leader, one of my goals for my team members is to have them think end to end about what we are building. In my #DreamTeam, everyone in the team would have a macro view of what we are building, the business impact of the project, and how the user story or the unit of work they are working on fits in the big picture. Why? Avoiding re-work and defects: If the team doesn’t know the answer to the question: “Are we building the right product?”, they can’t possibly answer the question: “Are we building the product?”. The product manager should not be the only one who thinks about what we are building. If the team understands the product, the spikes will be created earlier in the process, we will have fewer surprises, and there are fewer possibilities of re-work. Motivation and purpose: Most of the time, as developers, we tend to focus more on data and lose the focus on what and why we are building something. It gets harder as we move to remote and distributed teams. Knowing the purpose and impact motivates everyone to work towards the common goal. Ownership: If developers are missing the big picture and write tests for just a small part of the feature (unit testing), they don’t feel empowered to own the product. As we run into late discoveries of missed requirements, this creates a culture of “hot potato”, where the blame is passed around. With big picture thinking, as developers, we own the code and defects, but as a cross-functional product team (Product, Engineering, and Design), the team will be empowered to own the feature. Collaboration: There is a multiplier effect when everyone thinks about connecting the dots and how their part of the puzzle piece fits perfectly to complete the puzzle. Everyone would contribute more, and it evolves the culture of design thinking within the team. How? If you agree that everyone on the team should be thinking end-to-end, the next step would be to actually make them do it. As with any organizational change, it’s easier said than done. It’s especially not easy if you have developers who would love to jump to hackathon-style coding. Here are a few ideas about how you can sell it to your team. At the start of the project, ensure that the team gets the whole picture. Foster a culture of psychological safety to discuss various scenarios. Give credit when a team member comes up with a scenario that no one else thought of and collaborates with the product team to find a solution. When communicating the urgency of the project, try telling the team the reason behind it. It also cultivates customer empathy. Example: Releasing this feature by September would help our largest customer to go live and help us bring $10m of additional revenue to our company. Hint: Developers like specific data, and numbers. Some might say that knowing the big picture could be a distraction to the developer. I beg to differ. Instead of getting lost in the data, the developers will take pride in knowing where their work fits in the whole product and feel more connected. Every developer wants to see their code in production. They get real gratification in seeing their feature working. Ask the question: What good is it to have a beautiful, modular, reusable code which eventually is not used by any of our customers? I have seen that big picture thinking tends to avoid burn out. Collaborating more with the cross-functional team makes the team feel accomplished rather than tired. If you see that someone is missing the whole picture and are jumping to development or taking it lightly, which causes issues, ask the developer to whiteboard their design. Ask more open-ended questions on how all parts or the entire feature would work. They will start to realize that sometimes it’s good to slow down to go faster. Bring this as part of the retrospective meetings. Most importantly, share the results. When the feature goes live, get the metrics about the usage, revenue gained, or any business impact. It takes time to change your team to think big picture, but when you get there, it would totally be worth it.