The Sprints
During my experience at a SaaS startup in Brazil (2019-2020), we had a great evolution in product development, with important relationships with our stakeholders.
That said, the company’s organizational chart provided a complete view of all the opportunities we had across all areas, including the planning and execution of sprints.
In general, sprints were two weeks long, enough to:
➡️ plan and solve challenges for execution;
➡️ validate and optimize all progress made in the sprint.
However, I realized that validation and optimization could be carried out simultaneously with the development process, that is, we could reduce the sprint by half.
The Framework
The main movement for this transformation was to start involving stakeholders more during the planning process. The main stakeholders would be the customers themselves.
We are talking about the dynamism of a SaaS startup, so communication and organization were key to maintaining order during sprints.
With this scenario in mind, we gradually implemented what we call User-Driven Development (UDD): a methodology for the strong involvement of stakeholders with the company.
In practice, we implemented a validation routine with stakeholders and another routine to generate new opportunities. Thus, users participated in product optimization on the most important fronts for product development.
And that was the main challenge:
🤔 How to establish this new routine in a short time for all the other teams in the company?
The Culture
The solution was to validate a first version of the UDD framework for the commercial team, which maintained frequent contact with stakeholders.
So we tested it first on our front line.
In the first two weekswe already noticed all the effects:
✅ We reduced the touchpoints between areas, which were previously necessary;
✅ We got much closer to our customers, which favored the generation of new opportunities for the product;
✅ We facilitate initiatives involving stakeholders, such as Member Get Member as a channel for acquiring new customers.
With the validation of the new framework, we began to involve other teams in meetings with stakeholders, such as marketing, product and customer success.
In other words, we started to generate new opportunities for areas of the company as a whole and eliminated a large part of the validation and optimization time in sprints.
Being even more specific, we shortened the product development journey by half, being more efficient in execution, as the main stakeholders were involved from the first moment of generating the sprint initiatives.