Plan your
software project
Solving the right problem
Methodically articulating your project’s purpose is the most cost-effective way to increase its chance of succeeding. We’ll lead you through the process, take a detailed look at your situation, then craft a flexible plan for success.
Our purpose-driven discovery and planning process starts by eliciting clear, concise answers to these foundational questions:
- What problem are we solving?
- Who are we solving it for?
- What specific outcome are we seeking to achieve?
With these answers in hand, we’ll help you craft a Project Purpose Statement in the form
"We’re building a CRM for independent plumbing businesses to help them convert 40% more of their sales leads into customers."
In our experience, poor alignment around purpose is the most common reason software projects fail. Articulating your purpose with clarity in a single sentence is the first step on the path to success. We'll help you get there.
Creating a plan for success
Greenfield projects
Even in sophisticated organizations, many project plans look like something this:
Have an idea → Make some assumptions → Get started
A more effective plan for a greenfield project might look something like:
- STEP → DISCIPLINE
- Articulate project goals → purpose definition
- Validate the problem with the people it affects → user research
- Research existing solutions → market research
- Get your team’s take → stakeholder interviews
- Define measures of success → analytics
- Form a hypothesis on how to solve the problem → product strategy
- Build something that tests the hypothesis → application development
- Put what you’ve built in the hands of those you’re serving → user testing
- Assess the solution against your success criteria → product strategy
- Adjust your hypothesis and iterate → product roadmapping
With your project purpose in hand, we’ll customize a rigorous discovery process, using a variety of tools from our tool box. When the discovery is complete, we’ll deliver a blueprint for your success (the outline of which might look a lot like the list above), informed by our experience, and tailored to your specific context.
Projects in production
For live projects, our discovery process focuses less on the original purpose of your product, and more on the objectives of our engagement with you. We will seek to gain a comprehensive, high-fidelity picture of where you stand today along multiple axes, enabling us to deliver as much value as possible in the time we work together.
Our discovery process for a production product might proceed as follows:
- STEP → DISCIPLINE
- Articulate the problem → strategy
- Conduct executive interviews → research + interviews
- Conduct engineering team interviews and workshops → research + interviews
- Review infrastructure and scalability → devops
- Assess deployment setup → technical advising + assessment
- Review application architecture → technical advising + assessment
- Observe and document development processes → technical advising + assessment
- Perform codebase audit → technical advising + assessment
- Assess automated test coverage → technical advising + assessment
- Inventory technical debt → technical advising + assessment
- Identify areas for improvement → technical advising + assessment
- Prepare and deliver discovery report → technical documentation
At the conclusion of our discovery, we’ll deliver a detailed, comprehensive Discovery Report to guide your development process, during your engagement with Tighten and beyond.
- User research
- Stakeholder interviews
- Technical advising
- Product roadmapping
- Engineering leadership
- Data + analytics
- Technical documentation
- Codebase architecture
let’s talk.