More about the topic of prioritization in product development, let’s discuss the concept of local optimization. It’s a process of completing isolated tasks in different parts of the system. It optimizes one specific business process, while harming the global business goal. Why are we being so radical about it?
Theory of constraints (TOC) gives a very clear answer. The product team should be focused on the activity that brings it closer to the business goal. Anything that is not related to the goal is meaningless; it distracts the team members and eats away the resources. It gets even more dangerous when your business uses a KPI system: in this case, the workflow is oriented at maximizing the metric that will bring the bigger bonus.
A lot of companies struggle with local optimization. This is the responsibility of CPOs to set up such a system that all team members are focused on maximizing the flow. TOC helps to do that; earlier we released a review of this prioritization framework: https://jet.style/articles/unblocking-the-bottleneck-theory-of-constraints-as-a-prioritization-technique
Here are more useful articles in this series:
