Unpacking Composite Attributes

We often use words like “agile,” “value,” and “effective” to describe goals and directions. And, while these are important, they are often…unhelpful. They’re vague and, therefore, can be easily interpreted by different people to mean different things.

When one person talks about improving agility, they may be referring to how quickly the product responds to customer learnings. At the same time, another may think about whether each product development team is tracking their work on a visual board. This disparity can be very wasteful, misleading, and conflict-laden.

The concept of composite attributes comes from data modeling, where a summary attribute, like “address” is composed of several, more specific attributes, like street address, city, state, ZIP, and country.

When used in our product development context, recognizing something as a composite attribute can invite consideration of the elements that comprise the larger whole. And using the term “composite attribute,” sounds super smart too. 🙂

We’re going to look at three steps to turning unhelpful composite attributes into powerful motivators:

1. Uncovering Supporting Attributes
2. Minimizing to Maximize
3. Experiment to Activate

1. Uncovering Supporting Attributes

Recognizing something as a composite attribute can invite consideration of the parts that comprise the larger whole. This requires curiosity. Each context is different - lead the way with curiosity in conversation.

Facilitate discussion to explore the composite attribute and identify supporting attributes. Here are a few tips to help:

• Observability: Ask observability questions like, 
  • “How would we see if we had more agility?” 
  • “How would we know if the product wasn’t valuable?”
  • “What would it look like if the team was effective?”
• Resources: Use resources like the Example Key Value Measures in the Appendix of the Evidence-Based Management Guide or the descriptions of the accountabilities in the Scrum Guide.
• Reactions: Look for reactions like, “We won’t be able to get to the composite attribute without that, but we also need other things.” This means you have a good candidate supporting attribute of the composite attribute.
• Measurability: Craft each supporting attribute into something that can be measured

For agility, you might discover supporting attributes like:

• How frequently we get feedback from our customers and stakeholders
• How quickly we learn from deploying a new version of the product
• How long it takes us to develop and release a new feature
• How quickly we react to a market change
• How frequently we release

For product value (the accountability of the Product Owner), you might discover supporting attributes like:

• How many customers purchase the product
• How many customers use the product or feature
• How many customers are repeat customers
• How satisfied are our customers
• How many customers refer others

For team effectiveness (the accountability of the Scrum Master), you might discover supporting attributes like:

• How often the team produces a Done Increment of product
• How many errors or defects are produced by the team
• How engaged the team members are
• How often outside decisions delay the team’s development
• How much of the team’s time is spent on new product development

These conversations will increase clarity, expose misunderstandings, and unlock creativity as you look toward your goals. Don’t worry if the list of supporting attributes is long - the next step is whittling it down to essentials.

2. Minimizing to Maximize

If we want to increase agility, value, team effectiveness, or any other composite attribute, we need a short list of supporting attributes that are critical to the larger goal. If there are too many, we won’t be able to select actions that affect the goal, and we diffuse the focus of everyone working toward the goal. In other words, we need to minimize the list to maximize the focus.

Minimize the list to maximize the focus

The best way we know how to do this is to use a Liberating Structure called MinSpecs. With a group of people who will be involved in achieving the goal:

1. Come up with a list of all the possible attributes that could support the composite attribute (this was covered in the previous step).
2. One at a time, consider each attribute and eliminate any that could be ignored while it’s possible to still achieve the composite attribute.

The conversations these simple steps produce are enlightening and clarifying. As the MinSpecs page says, “Often two to five Min Specs are sufficient to boost performance by adding more freedom AND more responsibility to the group’s understanding of what it must do to make progress.”

As a side note, you may discover it’s necessary to jettison the composite attribute when communicating. Perhaps it has become so strictly defined in unhelpful terms that redefinition is nearly impossible, and it’s clearer to use the supporting attributes or other terms to describe the high-level direction.

3. Experiment to Activate

Once you have a handful of supporting attributes, running experiments is a great way to unlock the creativity of your team and learn your way toward the composite attribute. Help those who are doing the work to create hypotheses: things they can do that might positively affect the desired outcome. Use the Change Hypothesis Template to clarify the hypothesis, select the smallest and most viable hypotheses, run experiments to test them, and observe the results.

A more robust framework for running empirical experiments toward larger goals is Evidence-Based Management. It describes effective goals, an iterative approach to make progress, and a set of Key Value Areas that empirically illuminate your current and desired realities.

Don’t be afraid to consider modifying the attributes as you go - you’re likely to discover things you missed or overstated. Collaboratively adapting these is a way to embody the qualities that will make your product development successful.

And that’s how you unpack composite attributes to get Unstuck!

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