Are you making progress?

You might have a clearly defined end goal or business outcomes, but how do you know if you are making progress?

When business goals are shaped and achieved over quarters or years, how can you check progress from on the ground? Amid the work and grind, how do we know if we are making progress?

From the Agile Manifest: "Working software is the primary measure of progress."

I interpret “working software” to mean two things.

• It’s in the hands of users. It’s shipped. Deployed. Available for use.

• It does what the business needs it to. It’s solving a problem, providing insight, or enabling a workflow.

That might be modified/refined slightly for data teams to be something like: "Working data products are the primary measure of progress."

Your north star is business outcomes. That's the only way that we can ultimately be successful.

But on-ground progress very often is as simple as shipping useful data products.

I’m here,

Sawyer

from ​The Data Shop