
Backpacking through Product Land
A few months ago I took a journey to Death Valley with a motley crew of 12 backpackers.
It was my first backpacking trip, and I was nervous. Did I have the right gear? Did I have enough food? Did I have too much food? What if something broke?
My friends were kind enough to patiently explain what I would and would not need for the four days. But as it turned out, having the right stuff was not the problem this trip.
We had a different issue.

Somewhere on the third day our Fearless Leader™ started getting a little nervous. The 12 of us were alone in the wilderness and we were not making good time to our target campsite that evening.
We were a few miles behind our plan, and heading for some tricky terrain without a clear path.
She knew that once the light faded we could easily miss key landmarks and end up severely off course in a desert landscape.
And we were miles from the nearest water source.

Someone accidentally dislodged a small boulder onto the big toe of one companion. Another had developed severe blisters... the kind that bleed. A third was getting more and more hip pain as the day wore on and the sun beat down on her 80 liter pack.
And our shadows were getting longer.
We came to a wide, bush-speckled valley and marveled at the rugged view. Two wild horses tossed their necks and ran across the plain as we stopped to watch.
I knew our leader well, and could see that she was trying to hide her worries.
As everyone paused to capture an image, I scampered up to the front of the pack for a candid conversation. She confessed that she was quite concerned, but didn’t want to worry anyone. Freaking out wouldn’t help anyone—she just needed us to move faster so we could pass the tricky bit with some daylight.
One by one, we put our cameras away, our packs back on and set out again.

As we moved along, the 12 companions stretched across the plain. At least a mile between the first and the last, and each clump of people almost too far to shout at the next.
As the 4th in line, I encouraged the two people near me to keep up a strong pace, resist the urge to stop and photograph. They replied:
“I know we need to get there sooner, but there are others behind us, we aren’t holding back the group. We all have to get there in the end, so it’s not any lost time if we’re a little slower in the middle. Besides the leaders aren’t that far ahead.”
I rushed up to urge the leaders. Set just a little faster pace, and we’ll all get there quicker. Their response:
“I know we need to get there sooner, but we can’t even see the tail of the group. We’re so far ahead as it is. See if you can get them to go faster. We have to keep slowing down to make sure we don’t lose anyone.”
Back to the back I shifted and tried to gently push for more energy at the tail of the group. They responded:
“I know we need to get there sooner, but the next person is just a little ahead of me. Don’t worry, I’m going the same pace as them… I’m not letting their lead get any larger.
We were all measuring our speed against each other, not against the goal. No one was actually wrong.
But we were all slowing down.

Somewhere in the middle of this I realized I was living a product team metaphor.
“There’s no need for me to get designs finalized yet, we won’t have engineering for at least a week.”
Fair.
“I don’t need to get copy to the translators yet, because we have at least a month of engineering left.”
Right.
“There’s no point to finishing this spec today, since I’m not going to have designers free till Friday.”
Yes, that’s true. All those pieces are true.
But if you follow that mindset, you’ll slide into a crushing abyss of slower and slower cycles.
Things won’t always go according to plan:
— You’ll miss an opportunity to get started a early on that project because you don’t have designs ready for engineers who free up ahead of schedule.
— You’ll have to hold back the feature release because the translation pipeline broke in the last week of the project and the strings weren’t in yet.
— You’ll slip a week on design because you got pulled into something on Thursday and didn’t get that spec in good enough shape for your designer to join Friday.
But it‘s actually much worse, and much more subtle:
—Your engineers won’t actually finish ahead of schedule because they don’t see any next work in the queue. Why hurry?
—Your copy translation won’t actually slot into free time during development because you’ll have to tweak designs to make room for the longer/shorter phrases. Scope creep.
—Your designers won’t actually free up on Friday because you don’t appear to be ready for them. They’d rather do more iterations on their current work then do nothing while they wait for you. No one tells you that’s why they’re still busy.
Everyone’s waiting on everyone else.

In the morning light we found the path we needed. It was our last day, and we were a few hours behind schedule because we were forced to camped a few miles south of where we had planned to be.
This was the day we intended to spend hours meandering through Marble Canyon—some of the most glorious igneous formations on the planet.
But because of our lost time the day before, we had to rush through it.

If everyone waits on everyone else, you won’t have enough time for the things that matter.
Your competitors aren’t waiting.
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