From today's mentoring, talking about the need from leadership to constantly race forward and building new stuff (for competitive advantage / keep sales happy / make clients excited etc). It's a common problem that I've come to refer to as the Barbarossa problem
#prodmgmt 🧵
#prodmgmt 🧵
Operation Barbarossa was Hitler's attempt to overtake Russia by reaching Moscow at lightning speed. It was risky but had high rewards. It also failed spectacularly, as we all now know. The reasons were many, but I'll cherry pick the ones that make my point
A big part of the problem with Barbarossa was that Hitler's army moved faster than their supply lines could keep up. This meant that their troops were isolated and eventually cut off. They got within sight of Moscow but ultimately got bogged down and ultimately repelled.
Lessons from this. (1) I'm not a particularly good historian and it's probably riddled with inaccuracies (2) stretching your supply lines & failing to secure your rear is a really, really bad idea!
In product management terms, this means.. well, secure your rear! It's all well and good trying to build for the future but if you're building on shaky foundations it'll eventually collapse. We've all seen that one "MVP" that got immediately pushed to production!
Call this tech debt, or product debt or whatever you want to call it, but stuff will eventually break. You need to keep your solution together, maintain and improve it otherwise you'll eventually be stuck with a 6 month mitigation programme to emergency repair it
No one is happy with unglamorous work but it's absolutely essential to build scalable success. If caught in "faster! faster!" syndrome, consider assigning %ages to different efforts & operate more like a portfolio. You can make progress on multiple fronts if you don't rush!
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