The Sherpa Project

In developing and envisioning software, it’s easy to forget about prioritizing value. Even with agile development teams, it’s common to see “sets” of functionality prioritized instead of rank-ordered. One idea that I’ve been pushing hard on lately is to not let anything into the backlog that’s not prioritized (as in rank-ordered).

Why? Well, one place we can pull ideas from is the inverted pyramid approach to journalism. The inverted pyramid approach is a common metaphor in journalism to avoid “burying the lead.” The “lead” of an article is the beginning of the article that conveys the core information of the story.
Journalism (and the publishing models of newspapers and periodicals) is a great place to look for ideas and inspiration for agile approaches. When a newspaper has to be distributed, it has to go. A newspaper isn’t held up for individual journalists to finish their articles. Sound familiar? This is exactly the same as doing time-boxed activities in agile approaches.

The essence behind the inverted pyramid (from Wikipedia):

The triangle’s broad base at the top of the figure represents the most substantial, interesting, and important information the writer means to convey. The triangle’s orientation is meant to illustrate that this kind of material should head the article, while the tapered lower portion illustrates that other material should follow in order of diminishing importance.

This makes perfect sense for a couple of different reasons (all of which have their own parallels in agile development):

1. If everything doesn’t match up perfectly in the layout or limited real estate of the paper, the end of the story can be cut out without sacrificing the important essence of the story. This also allows for the staff to quickly make room for late-breaking news or for additional advertising.
2. The reader of the story doesn’t need to read the entire article to understand the core elements of the story. In fact, they can usually get almost all of the information by just reading the first few sentences.

In addition to using this as a guiding principal for the prioritizing of the backlog (see reason #1 above), we can also apply this technique to our own writing for any documentation that we need to create (see reason #2).

I first ran across this concept while reading Made to Stick. One of the quotes from the book is by Dan Wycliff (an award winning editorial writer) who says:

“I’ve always been a believer that if I’ve got two hours in which to write a story, the best investment I can make is to spend the first hour and forty-five minutes of it getting a good lead, because after that everything will come easily.”

Practicing this approach can help us steer towards generating revenue faster (through prioritized features) as well as clear writing (by focusing on the important information).