3x explore expand extract

src: 3x Explore, Expand, Extract - 2022-10-28

Abstract

There are two ways to look in economics:

• convex
  • small investment, large payoff
  • people wants to maximize the investments in order to have the payoff
• concave
  • large investment, huge loss
  • people wants to avoid loss and try to enhance the investment

Those ways can also be used in softwared practice, e.g. agile, waterfall like,…

One important question to ask: What do I have to lose?

Experiments: successful or not, you learn something.

• Explore: How hard is it to try the idea?
  • convex world
• Expand: scale
• Extract: KPIs, continuous progress
  • concave world

Related video: From XP to TCR & Limbo

Kent Beck explains there are 3 phases a successful company encounters that implies different style of management, engineering, financing, etc… Daniel Terhorst-North has the same experience and uses different terms, but has the same correlations:

• Explore:
  • Phase where the company invest on multiple features / products to find the one that can be successful, i.e. move fast and break things.
  • KPIs do not make sense because the feature / product either achieve $0 or 100 times what they predicated.
  • Maxime discovery.
• Expand / Stabilize:
  • Rocket is launching.
  • Focus on what was successful to stabilize, make it grow, scale it.
  • Minimize variance at this point, keep it stable.
• Extract / Optimize:
  • More predictable style, people can estimate.
  • KPIs make more sense in this phase.
  • Minimize cost, reduce all the inefficiencies, look at the economics.