Imagine… you were tasked with writing a blog. It is not hard to do. But you want this to be a good blog. A great blog. One which will provide value to the readers and possibly generate leads for your company, and traffic to its website. But the catch is, you are not really a writer. You understand writing, you have dabbled, but it is not really your area of expertise. Lucky for you, your company has a team of writers who can handle that for you, all you have to do is give them your great ideas.
You do not want to just start writing, you want to learn about your readers, so a reasonable place to start might be to do some research. This is commonly called “Discovery”. You might want to find out what blogs have had good customer response in the past. You might go out and interview some prospective readers to understand what they like in blog posts. What is it they are likely to interact with? What might drive them to want to learn more about your company and what they do?
Dual Track Agile
So you hit the streets and talk to a few people. You also do some secondary research on the Internets, and a few trends emerge. Readers like illustrations that explain a concept as opposed to just words (like the one here). And readers love blogs with funny memes. That was not necessarily surprising, it was a hypothesis you had going in, but it was definitely confirmed. Breaking from a traditional approach where you “finish” all the Discovery at once then hand it over to the Delivery Team (the writers) and have them create a complete blog, you opt for what is referred to as a dual-track approach. Dual Track aims to overlap the Discovery and Delivery as much as possible, to close the feedback loop w/ customers by having the Delivery team focusing not on “done” artifacts, but on validated prototypes. It invites the Delivery team into the Discovery process, and vice-versa, and aims to build a better end-product. While the Delivery team is working on constructing the next set of prototypes to test, you are off learning more about customer needs, slowly refining what they actually find valuable in blogs through these prototypes.
The longer you wait to get feedback, the more expensive it is to react to it
As the customer needs emerge based on their feedback, and as the end product becomes clearer, the fidelity of the prototypes can increase. The idea is to start with the lowest fidelity prototype necessary to get the learning you need. There is no reason to over-invest in something the users do not need or care about, so start small, with things like sketches and mock-up to collect user feedback. In this case the Blog Writers develop several diagrams and funny memes for potential readers and gauged their reactions. The quick prototype showed a clear bias toward simple diagrams that provided some examples (the one to the left scored well), and cat memes.
So while it may not be your cup of tea, you throw in a gratuitous cat meme. It’s important to remember, the content for the blog derived from validated reader feedback. The purpose of Discovery is to, well, discover the requirements, not just create them from your own assumptions. Furthermore, in dual track we do not wait until the end to validate, we validate during the Discovery process. This is what users said they wanted, and it was validated through prototyping. Though you have to admit, it is sort of funny, because cats definitely knock things over for no reason.
At some point, it’s become clear that what you ended up with for a blog is entirely different than what you imagined at the start. It is likely entirely different than what any reader might have imagined when you asked them to describe a blog about Dual Track Agile. And that is the beauty of the process. By letting the end-product emerge from a series of small tests and prototypes, we are able to create something much more valuable in the end. Dual Track agile raises the level of collaboration within the team. It puts the “doers” closer to the end users, and builds in a rapid iteration cycle of validated learning that results in much better work.
And cat memes.