Productivity in product development

When I see product teams shipping feature after feature thinking “oh wow! We are so productive!”, I’m not so impressed. They’re celebrating when the real work has barely begun.

This is my attempt to reflect on productivity in software product development, so “just thinking out loud”.

We usually think of productivity as how much you get done per hour worked. But IMHO that doesn’t make sense when building software.

I think that product development isn’t really about “building” things. It’s about figuring out what to build, talking to users, making decisions, and act on feedback. Most of the real work happens in conversations, experiments, and those “aha!” moments when you realize you’ve been solving the wrong problem or building the wrong thing.

Which means being at peace with the fact that we’re not done unless we can measure the outcome of our work. For example, did we manage to increase the number of sales from this customer segment?

So, how can we reframe productivity in product development?

Maybe instead of asking “how much did we build?” we should ask “how much did we learn?” and “how many problems did we actually solve?”. Or even “How much uncertainty did we reduce”?

This is also where the “AI makes me more productive” argument is flawed, because coding has never been the bottleneck.