Cadenced Flow

A practice-based approach for optimizing product delivery.

Teams need cadence.

Work needs flow.

Cadenced Flow is a specific set of team practices that create an integrated system that improves product outcomes, enhances delivery effectiveness, and provides predictability.

For feedback or questions, please email hello@cadencedflow.org

Foundational Practices

These four practices are the baseline for any modern product development team, but are specifically called out because the Core and Amplifying practices are built on them.

It would be nice to assume that any teams using a modern product development methodology would be doing these already, but that's not always the case. If these practices are missing or weak, you will struggle to adopt the rest.

Concentrate On A Goal

The team has a shared understanding of their common product or business goal. Team members can explain how their work directly contributes to that goal.

Continuously Improve

The team can quickly identify and try ideas to improve how they work. They stop regularly to reflect on how things have been going and make the time to get better.

Cadence Evaluation

The team understands and agrees with the purpose, value, necessity, and frequency of all their meetings. They reevaluate these to keep things contextually appropriate.

Coordinate Often

Team members plan and discuss their regular work activities and interactions in timely ways allowing them to prepare and adjust to evolving work situations.

Core Practices

These are the main practices that, when used together, improve product outcomes and delivery effectiveness, and provides predictability.

While each practice is individually useful, to gain the full benefits of Cadenced Flow, all six should be adopted over time. It is the combination of and interaction between these practices that give them their unique leverage.

Capability Slicing

The team can identify and create the thinnest possible deliverables to 1) accomplish a specific user task, 2) meet an end-to-end user goal, and 3) achieve a business result.

Customer Sensing

Every team member learns something about the customer every 1-2 weeks and can share how it might apply (or not) to their product decisions and direction.

Single-piece Workflow

The team typically only works on one thin-sliced capability at a time, swarming to get it done. They only pull in a new capability once they have finished the current one.

Probabilistic Forecasting

The team uses historic throughput data from lower-order capabilities to create a Monte Carlo simulation for completing higher-order capabilities.

Co-Created Specification

Acceptance criteria is added just-in-time when a dev pulls in new work. The dev and product manager (and other roles as needed) co-create a testable specification.

Story Mapping

The team creates (or adds to) a user story map when pulling in a new capability to work on. This is aided by low-fi UI designs, personas, user journeys, etc... as needed.

Amplifying Practices

Once the Core Practices are being used effectively, the Amplifying Practices will take your team's effectiveness next level.

These practices have amplifying interactive effects with the Core Practices. They will add value one by one as each is incorporated into the integrated system created by the Core Practices.

Exploratory Swarming

The whole team stops for a half to full day, every 1-2 weeks, to engage in chartered, time-boxed exploratory testing. Identified issues are preferably fixed immediately.

Continuous Delivery

The team creates and maintains the infrastructure needed for continuous testing, deployment, and delivery. Preferably using trunk-based development.

Design Studio Method

The whole team engages in facilitated, designer-led sessions when working through UI prototypes, user journeys, and other design-related activities.

Collective Ownership

Team members continually work towards becoming generalizing specialists. They are increasingly involved in all aspects of product development, from strategy to delivery.

Health Metrics

There's a lot of useful things that could be measured. But it's not always useful to measure lots of things. A good rule is to always know what decision will be made or action will be taken from anything being measured. It also help to know the "sunset criteria" for any metric being tracked.

These metrics wont be the only ones needed. But they do provide insight into team effectiveness and product quality and usability.

Systemic Impediments

The team keeps track of and quantifies the things outside its control that slow work down. The organization uses this information to make decisions about flow optimization.

Feature Usage & Task Completion

The team instruments the product for feature usage and task completion. This helps improve decisions about what features to build and how to enhance product usability.

Product Enhance-ability

The team uses a set of metrics to understand the difficulty and risk of making product changes. This improves product resilience, responsiveness and increases lifetime value.

Work Item Aging

The team tracks when work was created and last touched. This helps the team make decisions about de-risking work and making workflow process improvements.

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