A senior leader wrapped up a Feature Mining session recently, looked around the room, and blurted out, “This is amazing. I want to Feature Mine everything now.”
That reaction isn’t unusual. Feature Mining is our collaborative technique for finding the first slice of value & learning through a big initiative. It has a way of turning a room full of skeptical, overloaded people into a group that’s genuinely excited about where to start — and aligned on why. We’ve been running sessions with clients across several industries lately, and we’re seeing this pattern repeat every time.
Here are three recent examples. Details have been changed to protect client confidentiality, but the patterns are real.
Automating Finance Work the Right Way
A CFO asked IT to take a hard look at all their finance processes—find the automation opportunities, figure out where AI makes sense, and free up their people from drudge work so they can focus on more strategic, interesting work. Big ask.
Rather than diving straight into a long planning process, we used the Core Complexity Mapping approach from CAPED (Complexity-Aware Planning, Estimation, and Delivery) with about 60 people from finance and IT, from the CFO down to individual contributors. That cross-level conversation surfaced which processes would benefit most—and gave everyone a shared picture of why. A few pilot processes emerged as clear starting points.
Then we ran Feature Mining sessions with small teams who knew those pilots well. For each one, the session produced a clear MMF (Minimum Marketable Feature) deliverable in weeks, not months. Each MMF would deliver real early value while teaching everyone “the order of the system,” moving later steps into more analytical, plannable territory.
Two things stood out. First, trained CAPED Practitioners led both the Core Complexity Mapping and Feature Mining facilitation. Humanizing Work was in the room, but in a supporting role. That matters because it shows the technique is learnable and transferable, not dependent on any particular facilitator. Second, that leader’s final comment wasn’t just her being polite. It was a genuine, spontaneous expression of excitement after aligning on a breakthrough solution in a little over an hour. That’s what Feature Mining tends to produce.
A Legacy System That Felt Impossible to Replace
An insurance and financial products company has been carrying an aging COBOL-based system for years. That legacy system is deeply tangled with supporting systems, making a full replacement feel almost impossible to do safely. The original plan involved years of work before seeing any real value.
One example of the limitations of that system reminded us of the Y2K problem. For our younger readers, many computer systems in the 1900s only allowed a two digit number to specify the year, and as the century turned, “00” would be interpreted as 1900, not 2000. This would lead to things breaking in a big way. Many NYE parties in 1999 had a “the world might end tomorrow” vibe to them, and consultants were paid big bucks to update old systems to allow a four digit year.
Our client experienced a similar (if less costly) limitation. Some products they wanted to sell literally couldn’t be configured in the old system because of limits on the number of characters in certain fields, hard-coded on the old mainframes.
In a Feature Mining session, the group started generating creative approaches that hadn’t come up before—ways to address core business needs without replacing all the system integrations at once. By the end, they had a path to deliver incremental value much sooner than originally planned, all while learning how the new system should work technically, gathering stakeholder input along the way, and building the political capital needed to see the initiative through.
Years were reduced to months for the first slice.
Getting Sales and Marketing What They’ve Been Waiting For
An IT organization is pulling together data from multiple lines of business into a single CRM, so sales and marketing can finally see individual customer insights and segment views at a glance. Large, complex, lots of stakeholders, lots of pressure.
We started with a pilot Feature Mining session with just the key initiative leaders—a chance to test the technique before opening it up more broadly. That session alone surfaced starting points that could deliver early value rather than waiting several months to show anything.
Based on that result, they invited subject matter experts from the actual sales and marketing teams into a follow-up session. With those voices in the room, even more innovative approaches emerged, ones with real promise to deliver meaningful value significantly sooner than what was originally planned.
What struck us most was the debrief. Leaders expressed genuine gratitude for being brought in this early. One team’s line of business wasn’t selected as the first slice, but they left understanding why another starting point was the smarter business decision, how they’d benefit from the early learning, and feeling like partners in the initiative rather than people waiting to be told what was coming. That kind of alignment is hard to manufacture. Feature Mining tends to create it naturally.
Want to Go Deeper?
Each of these situations involved a complex initiative that felt too big, too risky, or too tangled to know where to start. Feature Mining gives teams a structured way to move from “this is overwhelming” to “here’s exactly what we should build first, and here’s why.”
There are a few ways to take it further, depending on where you are:
- Start for free. The CAPED resources at humanizingwork.com/caped include pointers to Feature Mining guidance from the Humanizing Work Show you can put to work right away. A long-time community member recently shared that they’ve been using that free content to improve how a major Silicon Valley company does discovery—no workshop required to get started.
- Learn it properly. Our self-guided course, 80/20 Product Backlog Refinement, teaches Feature Mining as part of a broader approach to getting the most important work in front of your team. It’s a practical, on-your-own-schedule way to build real skill with the technique.
- Go all in. Our next Certified CAPED Consultant workshop is in May, in person. It’s the best way to build the skills to run Feature Mining and the full CAPED approach for your organization. Or if you’d rather have us come in and facilitate directly, like we did in the examples above, let’s talk.
Last updated