Recent Win
A “Recent Win” is a very brief (2-5 sentences) story about a small increment of delivered business value:
Mary delivered a substantial improvement in lead conversion, from 4.5% to 6.3%, a 28% increase. The company had been losing Sales Qualified Leads in the conversion funnel, a problem for both the sales and marketing team. After top to bottom analysis of the conversion funnel, Mary identified two low effort, high impact changes, which also simplified the technical implementation.
From time to time, it may be convenient or necessary to provide a very brief summary of the business value delivered for some increment of work. These sorts of synopses lend themselves to templating. A good template will answer the following questions, listed in preferred order:
- What was the benefit delivered in terms of business value?
- What was the problem to be solved?
- Who are the stakeholders?
- How was it accomplished?
Writing an effective Recent Win is non-trivial. Like any skill worth mastering, it takes a fair amount of practice to write an effective Recent Win quickly.
The order of the elements is designed to tell a compelling story in 2-5 short sentences. The story is the most important aspect, which is why the order of the story elements is suggested instead of mandated. If the story is more compelling told in a different order, use the more compelling order.
Benefit in terms of business value
This is the business claim about what was accomplished. Be quantitative whenever possible. Support the claim with links to project management tickets (Shortcut, Jira, etc.), pull requests, requirements documents, or other relevant material which backs up the claim.
The idea here is that the initial line claiming business value can stand alone on someone else’s executive presentation.
Ideally this is a single sentence, at maximum two sentences.
The business claim is the lede setting the context and positioning the hook for the Recent Win story.
Problem to be solved
State the problem in a single sentence following the value claim.
In story terms, the problem to be solved is the “inciting incident” and sets the hook positioned by the business claim.
Stakeholders
A single line listing all stakeholders. When the stakeholder information may be incorporated into the business claim or problem statement, that’s preferable.
Technical details
The technical details are the least important aspect of a Recent Win and should conclude the story. Try really hard to make the technical details a single sentence. It will be of very little interest to the audience for the Recent Win. However, when possible, it should be written to support a follow-on paragraph going deeper into the technical details, which you the writer may find useful in the future.
Concluding remarks
Recent Wins are easier to write for features, harder for platform work. I should get back into the habit because writing them up really helps me understand the impact of work which got done.
For platform work, understanding the business value in terms of risk mitigation is probably the way to go, but there has been very little work on risk assessment in software engineering. In contrast, I have whole books on it for civil engineering, and once took a graduate class in it.