How do you go from Divergent to Convergent development?

Question

Divergent = experimentation, proof of concept, excitement, new ideas, creative process.

Convergent = turning that intensity into something deliverable.

Hello!

We've indulged in a few weeks of divergent dev, breaking ground on some genuinely innovative stuff.

But, now is the time to be convergent. Reconcile all the ideas and working experiments into something deliverable.

My open question to this wonderous forum is what strategies do you have for managing this process?

How do you go from divergent to convergent development?

I ask because I'm not quite sure!

For more context there is additional description of this here on our updates page: https://plummail.co/updates/10-spinning-too-many-plates/

Looking forward to discussing. I'm on GMT so might not reply right away on account of the time difference.

Thank you,

Richard

Alejandro Cantarero · Accepted Answer

This is always hard.

I saw your post and I like the focus on knocking off competing services.

When we have a lot of ideas, I'd say the criteria we use most commonly to narrow down the list are:

1. Do we think it will have a measurable impact on our current "North Star" metric.  Maybe that's acquisition, reduce churn, increase revenue.  Improve a specific acquisition channel.  But we often choose what to work on based on that first.
2.  Things that fix user pain points in our software.  Usually identified through one of the myriads of measurement tools we use
3. Differentiators.  Will the idea help move us in a direction that our competitors don't have.  Will it, like in the plum mail case, remove the need for a 2nd product to be in the mix, and can they only use our tool instead?

That at least lands us at a selection process.

On the development side, I think the move from divergent to convergent at least for us is perhaps focused on process.

During an experimentation phase, research spike, POC you are moving fast. Writing code, seeing what it does, etc.  No polish, probably no testing so you can get it done quickly and validate the idea.

As soon as we'd move to a more serious build-out and integration into the product phase of development, we'd bring back things like writing out user tests and unit tests.

Not sure if that's helpful, but that's what came to mind!