One trend I’ve noticed talking to production leaders lately, and what I think it means.

I’ve noticed a trend in recent conversations with production company leaders.

Teams are getting caught out when the “project” becomes a product, and unscoped, long-term requirements emerge late in delivery.

Peers have asked, how would I prevent this? Would I implement a hybrid production approach to manage it better?

The answer is: I would train producers to talk “scope of value” before “scope of work”.

Prod cos. don’t often engage in long-term agreements with clients. We have spent a lifetime working project-to-project; this is our business as usual. We are so used to it that a) we are not familiar with taking up strategic space, so b) we don’t know how to.

It means we struggle to ask the qualifying questions that will help us determine what is meaningful about our work.

The solution to the problem of uncaptured, long-term requirements is for leaders to help teams break free of the short-termism endemic in our business and occupy the mindset of a strategic partner. And that all starts with developing a set of simple, conversational tools to drive those types of conversations.

Questions like:

Tell us, will the project create long term (strategic) value or short term (tactical) advantage? Why?

What will change for you (POC + client) if we succeed?

What is to you (POC + client) if we don’t?

We are well-versed in capturing the project and user requirements at the start of the project:

Deliverables include X

Users must be able to do Y

But we neglect to capture:

The client business must be able to do Z [on delivery]

If we can teach our teams to surface whether the project is business as usual for the client, the potential to pivot from a short-term to a long-term revenue outlook that product work provides is vast.

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