I shot off a quick thought the other day that I’d like to linger on:
It’s true: requirements, without fail, change.
Even so (or all the more), the job of a good Product Lead—whether PO, PM, PD, VP, or CPO, everyone—is to guard against unnecessary, preventable volatility—aka change.
Unfortunately, the Agile Manifesto has taken a back seat to the agile method’s tendency of breathlessly reacting rather than being stable and disciplined when approaching solutions.
I’ve said it before and will undoubtedly say it again: focus is the ultimate skill.
Being distracted is the norm, modern society’s drug of choice. It’s the heartbeat of our digital economies. In that world, the person who can focus well enough and long enough to find the signal amidst the noise is the one who will win.
And they’ll win big.
“Play stupid games, win stupid prizes” applies here to the selection of problems to solve. Being better at solving a particular problem doesn’t indicate one is good at problem solving the problem of which problems they should solve.
Another way to put it is that it’s the quality of the problem, not the quality of the solution, that usually generates outsized impacts.
Back to point: “the only constant is change” doesn’t equate to constantly changing. Whiplash is real and, much like in real life, it’ll coincide with getting wrecked. So ya better check yoself.
Yet following a [Waterfall methodology](https://www.workfront.com/project-management/methodologies/waterfall#:~:text=The waterfall methodology is a,detailed documentation%2C and consecutive execution.), with all of its up-front “certainty” is a means of chasing waterfalls—self-destructive and harmful. Now, does the astute reader want to take a gander at why that is? (Hint: it’s a great plot twist!)
Because the waterfall approach doesn’t—wait for it—allow change!
Mixed Signals
So I’m harping on both too much and too little change as problems? Yep!
A great deal of things can be true at the same time.
We never have perfect information. The world in which we build products is anything but static (human nature notwithstanding). Change is inevitable. People hate change, and teams hate it in an aggregate.
What then?
We detangle direction and details.
Too often in our planning we conflate the two. We smoosh our desired outcomes into the tiny space of specific features. We crush a (half-baked) vision into a tiny little package called a backlog, full of cute little tickets.
Do you want a zippy user experience? Or do you want this kind of algorithm on top of this sort of stack using that new Javascript framework? The latter very well may be exactly the best way to go about it, but it is not the actual it we’re trying to achieve—is it?
In religious circles this is often discussed as “the sign vs. the signified.” My homeboy Alan Watts hits a home run when borrowing from Buddhist simile saying,
[It] is like a finger pointing at the moon, and one must take care not to mistake the finger for the moon. (source)
In our world, the problem solving mechanisms aren’t to be confused with the problems being solved.
All that in mind, it’s paramount that we detangle the two.
We hold steady the outcomes. We protect the constancy of our goals. We spend necessary time envisioning what the world should look like, not just which hammers we’ll grab to bang it into shape.
Pivaaaat!
When that happens, we are free to pivot on how we get there. We can absorb switchbacks because we know we’re climbing this mountain.
On the other hand, when the implementation itself is confused with the actual outcome, any changes to how we go about something is ultimately a change in what it is we’re trying to achieve. We didn’t switchback, we decided on a new mountain.1
It’s the difference between trying to hit a moving target and moving yourself to a better position to ensure the greatest chance of success.
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Nothing about this discussion requires us to put our heads in the sand. When things sufficiently change—economic downturn, competitive intel, staffing, logistics, etc.—we very well may have to change our course. That’s readily absorbed, even embraced, by a team when they have every reason to trust it is strategic and necessary. Leaders crying wolf via constant change will have already bankrupted their account.