How to Write Good Features, Products and Pinecones Edition

    When is the last time you learned about a complex system? For me it was learning about how the conifer trees' reproduction cycle works...... don't ask. I will spare you the detailed steps of the entire system, but it's a series of intricately woven together steps. Requiring multiple explanations before I had a basic understanding of how the system works. Before now, I had no idea there were actually male and female pine cones. It was amazing, and far more complex than I had imagined. I don't expect you to want to learn about conifer trees. I do expect you to mentally prepare for a bunch of conifer and pine cone metaphors about product management and features. Why did I choose conifer trees? Mainly because you may have one in your living room right now.

Feature Mechanics Within a Large System

    That sounded way to intimidating even for me. Makes me think I'm about to drop some casual particle acceleration equations into the post.... don't worry. I had to Google what that even was, you're safe and we are sticking with conifer trees and features.

    There are great resources out there teaching you about concepts used by agile teams to break down large systems into manageable pieces of work. Capabilities, epics, features, enabler features, stories, are just a few of them. Honestly I don't think I'm really the expert on what each of these concepts are. If that is what you're looking for I would suggest taking a look at Scaled Agile. They do a great job of creating definitional resources around agile. 

    What I want to spend our time talking about is how to practically make use one concept, features. If you did some research on that link, which we all know you're diligent and did exactly that, you already know that features have 3 basic parts to their structure. 

1. Feature Summary: What you're feature plans to accomplish written in a business friendly format.
2. Benefit Hypothesis: This is where you define you measurables and how you believe the feature is going to benefit the users of the product. Think about how this feature's valuable to the broader system. I use this format on almost every feature I write. 
   We believe this will....

• Some Examples
• enable <this functionality> for <whoever will use it>
• increase or decrease <this measurable KPI> <if possible I include an estimated amount>
• list off other value statements here

1. Acceptance Criteria: This is all the detail. What you're trying to build, the outcomes you need in order to extract the hypothesis value. Direction and enough content for the product owners to create user stories. Sometimes these can get pretty descriptive depending on what you're trying to do.

    I know you already knew all that, but now we're in the same understanding on features. Which are one of the most important agile concepts for product managers.

Back to conifer trees. 

For the rest of the time, we are going to work on a feature for the conifer tree preproduction system. 

    Disclaimer, I'm not an arborist or even remotely qualified to be ideating on this system. Don't believe any of the details when it comes to the actual conifer tree. Do you're own research. 🌲😀

Identify a problem or opportunity within the broader system

    When learning about the conifer tree system it actually seemed like a pretty bullet proof process. There are definitely points of waste when looking at it from an outside perspective. I'm not a great arborist, but I did happen upon this little fact. Male pine cones, which produce the pollen needed to fertilize a seed are typically on the lower branches of the tree. At first glance this seemed like a problem. Discover ideas.

Why not move the male pine cones to the upper branches so the pollen falls onto more female pinecone? More pollen would also be carried by the wind at a higher starting point.

    By doing a little research I discovered that it's not good for the pollen to fertilize seeds from the same tree. By having the male pine cones lower it decreases the odds of this happening while only slightly decreasing the efficiency of the system overall. Validate assumptions.

At this point I realized this was going to be a harder than I thought. The designer of this system was pretty dang good.

    I decided to look at the competition to see if I could draw some inspiration. I discovered massive diversity within reproduction systems of vegetation. I turned my focus to flowers. Understand the competition.

    Honestly, if you're still reading kudos, this is going deep. I'm clearly far to invested in vegetation reproduction systems here. Regardless, I hope you are seeing how this relates to product management. Generating ideas, discovering competition, validating assumptions before building, it's all related. 

    I thought to myself, why do these systems have to stick to one version of these processes? Flowers leverage all kinds of insects to move pollen from one location to another. Conifers should do the same. Insects are everywhere.

    

    I had my idea, create a new transport method for conifer pollen leveraging insects. This might be a terrible idea, but we are gonna give it a try. Let's draft a feature!

Feature Summary

    We want to introduce another reproduction process to our new friends conifer trees leveraging insects. Simple, easy to read.

Benefit Hypothesis

    We believe this will.....

• increase the resiliency of the conifer species measured by the growth of existing conifer forest compared to our new enhanced forest friends. A/B Testing with a control group.
• allow us to understand more about the complexity and nuance when it comes to the natural development of these large scale systems. Treat the first implementation as experimental POC, MVP, what ever you want to call it.
• allow conifer trees to eventually rule the world so we never run out of Christmas Trees. 
• bring joy to the hearts of many product managers throughout the world.

Acceptance Criteria

• Conifer trees pollen can be easily transported by at least 5 different commonly found insects within the forest. Define scope with limits and context.
• The insects are incentivized to naturally transport the pollen from male to female pine cones.
• The current wind based reproduction process for conifer trees should remain unaffected. 
  Outcome driven not prescriptive on the solution used.

That was a lot of talk about conifer trees, I hope you see the forest through the trees though. 😉 Product managers .......

need to be able to breakdown these complex systems. They need to ask questions, conduct research, validate assumptions, give structure and direction to features, and allow the teams space to bring great solutions forward. 

You may not be writing features about conifer reproduction systems anytime soon, but I hope you can use this framework to improve the features you're writing!

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