The real problem with scope creep isn’t missed timelines.
It’s not that it takes too long, or costs too much, though these may be true. The real problem with scope creep is that you lose sight of why you were doing something in the first place.
An engineer adds a feature here, a designer makes some UX improvements there, a marketer requests a “simple” change, and suddenly your MVP has turned into something else entirely. Yes, the functionality is all there, but the analytics are incomplete, the test is muddied, and your team hasn’t validated or invalidated its hypothesis.
Product teams need to be careful to keep their eyes on the prize.
At Hipmatic, we solve this by doing a daily Product Standup. Unlike your typical engineering standup, our product standup focuses less on tickets and blockers and more on the big-picture strategy. Are the things we’re working on still moving us closer to our goals? What’s the best next action we can take to move us forward.
Sometimes these meetings take 5 minutes, and they assure everyone on the time that we’re doing the right things. Sometimes they take 45 minutes, but we course correct before wasting weeks on something we didn’t really need to do.