If you’re in a purely software business, your constraining resource is often (not always, not even necessarily in most cases, but often) the rate at which software gets changed. Well, specifically, the rate at which software gets changed in a direction your customers or potential customers are interested in. This means that the limiting factor on growth is likely to be rate at which you can add features or fixes that attract new customers, or maintain old customers.
It’s common to see business where this constraint is not understood throughout management, particularly manifesting in sales. In a business to business context, symptoms include:
- sales teams close deals with promises of features that don’t exist, and can’t exist soon.
- there’s no time to fix bugs or otherwise clean up because of the new feature backlog.
- new features get added to the backlog based on the size of the requesting customer, not the cost/benefit of the customer.
- the product roadmap is “what we said we’d have, to whom, by when”, not “what we will have”.
As Eliyahu Goldratt says, you have to subordinate the whole process to the constraint. That means incentivising people to sell something a lot like what you have now, over selling a bigger number of things you don’t have now and won’t have soon.
