How to guides

How to actually do this

The methodology is one thing. Doing it well, day in day out, is another. These are the step-by-step playbooks for the moves the Tenhaw Way asks you to make, written for the human doing the work, not the deck reviewing the framework.

Setting up the work

1
How to set an outcome
An outcome is a business result with a £ price tag. If you can't price it, it isn't an outcome, it's a wish.
2
How to put together a quarterly roadmap
A roadmap is one quarter, twelve to thirteen weeks. Outcomes can span quarters; epics cannot.
3
How to write a value-focused epic
An epic is your unit of value contribution to an outcome. If it doesn't carry a £ number, it's a feature wishlist.
4
How to break an epic into stories
A story is the smallest piece of user-visible value the team can ship. If it doesn't change the user's experience, it's a chapter, not a story.
5
How to do discovery research
Discovery is how a hypothesis stops being a hunch. The Discovery Workbench keeps the evidence linked to the work, not buried in a Notion archive.

Writing the work

6
How to write a story
A good story is small enough to build in a sprint, specific enough to test, and honest about the assumptions it carries.
7
How to write a chapter
A chapter is what a developer creates when a story turns out to be bigger mid-build. It's a tactical sub-task, not a user-visible slice.
8
How to raise a bug
A bug is a defect in something already shipped. If it's a missed requirement, it's a story, call it what it is.
9
How to write a risk or issue
A risk is something that might hurt delivery. An issue is something that is hurting delivery right now. The RAID log is where both live.

Shipping & supporting

10
How to write release notes
Release notes serve four audiences with one ship: customers, support, exec, and the on-call dev. Write each one for its reader.
11
How to run live monitoring after a release
The first 7 days post-release are when reality contradicts the staging environment. Live monitoring is the structured check that catches it.
12
How to run a root cause analysis
An RCA isn't a blame exercise. It's an investigation into the system that allowed the failure, so the next one doesn't happen the same way.

Measuring & managing

13
How to measure value (outcome validation)
A shipped epic isn't a delivered epic. Validation is what closes the loop between "we built it" and "it worked".
14
How to manage day-to-day product delivery
A product manager's daily job is sequencing decisions, not status updates. If you're spending all day in Slack, you're doing it wrong.
15
How to manage day-to-day delivery to be on time
Predictable delivery isn't about pushing harder. It's about catching slips early, when the cost of correction is small.

Forecasting & team health

16
How to use Monte Carlo forecasting
A single delivery date is a guess. A Monte Carlo forecast is a probability distribution, and that's what lets you commit honestly.
17
How to use the optimisation algorithm to deliver a portfolio on time
The optimisation engine sequences the whole portfolio so the maximum number of commitments land on time, not just the loudest one.
18
How to run team health checks
Unhealthy teams don't ship. The monthly health check is a structured five minutes per person that tells you, well before any retro does, where morale is going.

Want hands-on help?

These playbooks are the headline rules. Embedding them across a real team takes practice, and most teams adopt the Tenhaw Way faster with a hand on the wheel for the first quarter.

Book a 30-minute working session with the founder, no sales pitch, just a working session to see if we're a fit.