My product-nerd-friend @atheus...hey you should post a thread of some drawings. Here goes:
1. The classic “here’s why you do incremental delivery” drawing ... aka “how not to dig a deep hole”. Yet legacy budgeting practices encourage one/not other
2. Here’s is the “perpetual cone of uncertainty” ... namely, unless you are a project shop, you’re likely to ALWAYS have uncertainty, even if you are also reducing it constantly
3. I’m seeing this crazy symmetry in terms of systems / technology & org design. They are all feeding into each other. Exhibit 1: the shift from batch processing to stream processing (cc @gwenshap ) and networked orgs @NielsPflaeging
4. What are you willing to pay to bet on the race AFTER the elephants have left the starting gate? What if it is free, but your competitors aren’t doing that?
Yet, traditional annual budgeting prevents us from playing this (more fun) game
5. How much time is your team spending on the value-add work vs. the “other things” ? And are you trying to get at this through some weird proxy of story points, time tracking, etc.? This is a hard question for many teams to answer.
7. I love this idea of nested sense/respond loops ... if these get too out of sync, you’ll get caught in a bit of a trap ... the output loop will spin WAY faster than the benefits loop. The goal is keep these orbits in better sync.
12. And finally ... meditating on the value of focusing myopically on “the problem” vs. creating a new attract and just letting things play their course.
The “messy middle” problems is one of the biggest impediments to product success. Here’s what it looks like:
The strategy and vision is somewhat clear.
Teams have specific features they’re working on.
But there’s nothing in between.
Why does it matter? 1/n
High level visions and strategies are helpful, but they lack the specificity to guide teams.
Specific project-based roadmaps feel “actionable” but they are very fragile—they don’t inspire aligned autonomy.
You need a linking mechanism 2/n
Some teams use goal cascades
The problem is the classic MBO problem: goals get more specific & prescriptive as you move down the stack. And by definition they should be “time bound”.
They too are fragile and foster “figure out what you want to build AND THEN tack on goals” 3/n
I was reading the transcript of a work presentation. Then I watched the presentation.
The transcript was filled with issues / logical fallacies / open questions.
While watching I noticed very few.
I think this is the root issue with presentation culture.
I noticed different parts of my brain firing in each context. When slides had lots of “stuff” it felt like a sense of “oh they’ve figured this out” even when the words did not match.
If you pay attention you can feel this happening.
The confident voice of the presenter made the “three focus areas” feel certain, clear, and logical.
In writing it felt incoherent.
I guess this is a point for “a compelling visual” but still it’s interesting.
Your team is burnt out. They are not getting anything done. Work is "low quality". You can see and feel those things.
But what you are seeing is an output of something—the downstream effects of other things happening.
In some companies this is a black box
1/n
…they don’t have visibility into what’s happening.
But it is not that simple (of course).
The outputs are inputs into the black box. And the outputs input into the inputs.
2/n
Say the team reactively addresses quality issues.
This creates more “work” (the output inputs into the input), but it also leaves the team more burnt out and they make less-good decisions on whatever is going on in the box.
3/n