Minimal shippable product - do "enough" and no more

So in September I started my annual Christmas knitting. Except every year the children get bigger and so the jumpers take longer to make.

This year I planned to make a cardigan for my son featuring holly leaves.

 

 

 

Last week my daughter saw my knitting, asked if I was making her one… it’s hard to say no. My instinct was to put down what I was doing and start a new jumper immediately.

 

If you have 2 jumpers to deliver, is  it better if come Christmas I have two half-finished jumpers, or one complete wearable jumper?

Sometimes trying to keep everyone happy, working on everything at the same time just delays delivery of anything, and may lead to everyone being disappointed.

(and actually it was much better to fess up that I had no chance of making my daughter a jumper in time, and take her to a shop to choose and buy one, than wait until the week before and end up buying two jumpers in a panic because I hadn't finished either!)

 

•      Focus! There is no value until the product is done!
 

 Focusing on what is actually needed is also essential – ideally the cardigan should have little red pompoms between each pair of leaves, but really this is just a  "nice to have".

Although it’s very tempting to sit making pompoms because that’s fun, rather than knitting a plain green sleeve, one is fairly critical to creating a finished product and should be completed first, before the embellishments are added.

Which leads us nicely to the concept of the minimal shippable product…the concept of doing just enough to make it work – ask “is it good enough” for the intended purpose.

Make sure you aren’t designing a Ferrari when all you need is a bike

Work through requirements in priority order and add features incrementally.

Knit your cardigan first, you can always add your pompoms later

Watch my snowman drawing iteratively develop from a minimalshippable product through 5 sprint cycles!

 

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