The potential product shipping chart is a score card for a technical executive running a engineering organization. This chat plots time on the horizontal axis and shipped product value. Jack Danger outlines the specifics of this scorecard in his Executive Engineering1. This requires Product to assign value to shipped features, but once that is done we can accurately see how much of this value was delivered over time. It may be useful to bin this by quarter or by some threshold of significance (e.g. “major” releases). Regardless of the company-specific tweaks, this can be used by the technical executive to: - Serve as a North Star metric for running the Engineering organization - communicate with Product about how they value and prioritize work - engage with the CEO around when it is important to go slower to go faster later or the reverse (go faster with the idea you will go slower later) - communicate with the engineering leadership about how to go faster or deliver more for less/equal cost.
It is also likely useful to maintain a copy that adjusts for engineering headcount since rapid growth may paper over inefficiency in delivery.
What’s important to internalize here is that this is not a measure of “shipped valued” but rather, potential shipped value. Shipped value depends on many other components in the delivery of a product (sales, product, and operations) and takes a long time to account. The potential part of the phrase captures that Product is the key stakeholder and decides how much value it believes a feature will provide in the features.
1. Danger, J. Executive Engineering: Practical Engineering Theory for Software Leaders. (The Technical Executive, 2024).