Oura’s Antti Hermunen on how to deal with the creeps and the challenge of time in digital product development

Oura is a true Finnish health tech success story: It is worn by users from athletes to royalty and managed to clinch a collaboration with Gucci. As USA Today said, it is an absolute marvel of modern wearable technology. Oura’s dedicated plan to produce finessed personal data to guide the individual health journeys of its users seems to be working.

You can’t pull a stunt like that without having multiple battles with time and winning most of them.

“Everyone is late sometimes, it’s part of the game. But what’s really important is that, instead of just releasing something, you make sure that the products you build create value for the end user.”

Hermunen talks about deadlines, knowing your project’s limits and how failures in time management can destroy culture and teamwork. For instance, your attitude to crunching can have serious long-term consequences.

“If you have a careless attitude to crunching, allocating too much work for the team can easily become a habit – and you can’t expect people to work overtime all the time. You’ll end up losing developers and knowledge”, Hermunen says.

Keep the creeps out of your project: control the scope and amount of features

Scope creep and its cousin feature creep are well-known pitfalls in software development. Yet, they are very common. In scope creep, the project’s scope grows and changes uncontrollably during the project. Feature creep means constant, excessive expansion or addition of new features.

“Products do need new features and the scope of a project can grow or change, but the key here is that it should not be an uncontrolled development.”

The creeps also have a third cousin who’s even worse: gold plating. That’s when you work on a project or task past the point of diminishing returns.

“Make releases as often as possible and as soon as you’re ready – that’s one of the most important lessons of software development.”

Three tips for setting up successful deadlines in software development

Deadlines are more or less essential to every project. But if you set them in an unreasonable manner, they can also become a great source of stress and havoc. Here are Hermunen’s tips on how to set fair and smart deadlines.

1. Keep software and hardware deadlines separate

Oura runs both software and hardware development. Hermunen says it’s crucial to keep the deadlines of these separate.

“If you make your software releases wait for the hardware releases, you start creating monoliths.”

2. Ask the team for estimates

Making promises and setting deadlines without consulting the team is not cool. Instead, it can feel rude and presumptuous.

“Try asking your team first – where are you really at and what’s the status? Promising something too optimistic on others’ behalf is a great way to destroy teamwork and culture.”

3. Don’t promise anything to the market in advance

If possible, consider your deadlines as tools for internal time management. And no matter what you do, avoid promising new features to the market before you are certain you’ll have them ready.

“You can always do marketing after the release, but if you promise to deliver something and miss the deadline it will weaken your relationship with your customers.”

Text by Mirva Uotila