Ever since my blog post on Torbjørn Marøs amazing Christmas blog series in 2012 I have kept drilling down into the same frustrations within the software development industry. And my 2 cents to this is that the remedy is not technology, it’s product management. Here comes a 2025 update to that old blog post.
When we talk about Value-Driven Practises in Contango it is not just about building valuable software, it’s about making smart decisions under uncertainty. At its core, it is a systematic approach to risk management: identifying, reducing, and ultimately controlling the risks that affect whether a product will deliver meaningful value at an acceptable cost.
Traditional software processes often assume too much, too early. They jump into solution mode before truly understanding the problem, its impact, and what success even looks like. Value-Driven Practises turns that on its head. It asks:
- Do we understand the problem we’re solving?
- Do we understand who benefits, and how?
- Can we measure whether the solution actually delivers that benefit?
- Do we know the likely cost of building it—and of maintaining it?
- Have we considered unintended side effects or system-wide consequences?
Until these questions are answered, and the associated risks reduced, any plan to “deliver value” is speculative at best.
Risk Before Specification
In this model, specification for development is not the start of the process—it’s the result of it. The initial goal is not to define the solution, but to attack the unknowns that cloud our understanding of value and cost. Every early activity is about creating learning loops that reduce risk fast and at low cost.
That’s why we often begin with UX-first thinking, not because UX is a design preference, but because user experience is the first-place value becomes measurable. Validating UX is the clearest and fastest way to test whether we understand the user problem and whether our proposed solution could actually deliver value. It’s a way of surfacing assumptions, flushing out hidden risks, and making better investment decisions before any heavy development work begins.
Clear Thinking: Anchoring Risk Management in Intention
Effective risk management also depends on clear articulation of intent. We call this Clear Thinking: the disciplined separation of intention from solution. Intention is the problem we aim to solve, why it matters, and how we will recognize success. Without this, teams build based on assumptions or interpretations, often misaligned with organizational goals.
Clear Thinking runs through the entire organization. From leadership to product to delivery, everyone must be able to express not just what they want built, but why—and how they will know if it’s working. This is just as crucial when working with AI tools as it is with human teams: if you cannot express intention clearly, you cannot delegate work effectively.
Throughput-Driven Prioritization
Once value and risk are framed, prioritization becomes throughput driven. Using principles from Throughput Economics and Theory of Constraints, we focus on reducing the most critical risks first—those that most affect the cost/value ratio. The goal is to continuously increase the confidence of our decisions through fast, lightweight iterations.
This might involve:
- Exploring user experience flows to reduce uncertainty on value delivery.
- Decomposing services and APIs to reduce architectural risk.
- Running cost or time breakdowns to surface hidden complexities.
- Testing assumptions about side effects or operational impact.
Each step is designed to create a clearer picture of whether an initiative is worth executing, or whether it should be abandoned early, saving resources for better bets.
The Outcome
The result of Value-Driven Practises is not just higher product quality. It’s:
- Lower rework due to better-aligned solutions.
- Faster time to confidence on what’s worth building.
- Scalable delivery built on real, validated understanding.
- Clearer communication and decision-making across roles and teams.
This is not a delivery methodology. It is a thinking framework for reducing risk at every level—from strategic planning to the smallest design decision. And it’s the foundation for truly value-driven work.
Beyond Technicalities - Contango 