(Don’t) Scream If You Want To Go Faster - How to Accelerate Product Development (with Ed Biden, Founder @ Hustle Badger)

Ed Biden is a product leader and passionate educator who has recently set up Hustle Badger, a product management education resource centre. When he was the CPO at FutureLearn, he helped to prove a new business model and he did it... quickly. I spoke to Ed about some of the principles he lives by when trying to accelerate product initiatives and deliver value faster.

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Episode highlights:

1. Executing fast means delivering more impact

The faster you're shipping, the more you're learning, and the faster you're going to understand what you should be doing. It's better to embrace inevitable uncertainty, get something out in the world and see how people react to it.

2. "Fast" is relative - you need to be as fast as you need

Not everyone needs to deploy 1,000 times a day. What fast means for you depends on your customers and their appetite for change, alongside internal factors that might impact it. Find the right fast for you.

3. Speed is always about trade-offs

You can't just go faster by ordering people to work faster - it's not sustainable. You need to work out what levers you can pull, what shortcuts are acceptable, and what's in and out of scope. You need to be willing to trade to get speed.

4. Radical transparency can help get away from "Go faster" execs

CEOs and business leaders often complain about speed and wish everything could be faster. It's important to be transparent with them, let them know the trade-offs & give them a stake in the decision so they buy in.

5. Watch where you spend your time

Often, teams spend a large proportion of their time on BAU and fighting fires. Keep track of this, because if you're spending 50% of your time not executing your strategy you're not going as fast as you can (and the results will reflect this).