Delivering

Now that we've started well and our direction is clear, we need to get moving and deliver value. Value in this context does not mean scope. While we may tend toward working off of a backlog to prioritize and track progress, we do not want to lose sight of what actually provides value — the difference we make for the business and the users.

The best way to ensure that we are delivering value is to deliver early and iterate. We intentionally want to deliver working software as early as we can in our project. By delivering to production early, we enable some fantastic things:

• the customer starts to realize some of the value early and throughout the project instead of at the end
• we get feedback from real users that we can incorporate while we are still actively developing
• we can use data to continually course-correct and better understand early if we are providing value or we need to adjust our approach -- this virtuous cycle helps ensure we are, in fact, providing value

Note that this doesn't mean that we can deliver absolutely anything to production — the first version still needs to be useful to users.