Clarity in Creation
Clarity is the quality of being easy to understand. Clarity means clearness. Clean water running down a mountain has clarity. So does a lovely singing voice; it’s clear and pure.
Sometimes people talk about having moments of clarity when suddenly everything about a particular situation or even about life itself comes into focus. People also talk about good writing having clarity when it is precise, clean, and easy to understand. That’s what I’d like to achieve here.
In a world of constant uncertainty, gaining clarity will give you a competitive edge.
In goal and task setting, we have a concept of laying a brick every single day. It involves starting with a monthly goal, then breaking that monthly goal into what you need to accomplish each week, and further what you need to accomplish each day. When building a wall, each day involves laying a single brick.
Overtime, I have been intrigued by the concept of attaining clarity. Who wouldn’t want to work less while getting more done? Parkinson’s law states that, “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. Working hard is not enough: By being clear you can accomplish more by doing less.
Building clarity has become the center stage of our organization. We’re building a product solely based on clarity, called Systematic Entrepreneurship, a product aimed to help new founders get unstuck on their journey towards entrepreneurship. It’s a step by step process or learning framework of executing on an idea. If we did not have a name for it, we’d probably have called it Clarity.
Establish Processes
One thing that has helped us is establishing processes that drive clarity.
Facebook changed its motto for developers from “Move Fast and Break Things” to “Move Fast With Stable Infra.” They feared that they may have been moving too fast to see where they were going clearly. Moving fast without a clear process in place can break things and slow you down eventually.
In software development, “Technical debt” happens every time you do things that might get you closer to your goal now but create problems that you’ll have to fix later. As you move fast and break things, you will certainly accumulate technical debt.
The interest payment on that debt is the extra effort that you must put into future development due to earlier design choices or defects. The longer you leave it unpaid, the higher those payments get. Eventually, it slows you down to the point where you can’t ship new features or innovate, potentially costing your business a ton of money or customers; and your developers their hair.
Having a system in place helps you build the capacity to think about how any given part will hold up and fit into the bigger picture over time. It also helps fast track learning for any developers who join later and are able to continue from where the last developer stopped.
As part of the product team, we have been on a constant journey of attaining clarity throughout our processes. During the initial stages, we set our sights towards solving a problem in a particular market. Having no prior experience in that market, we interviewed experts in the space to clearly understand the problem and better understand the customer we are solving for. We experimented with different ways of asking questions to help us drive insight. Slowly by slowly, the mist started to clear and we started deriving insights and understanding the space better. We became empathetic towards our users and wanted to create better experiences for them.
Mentors have also been a good resource in helping us attain clarity. When it came to building the product itself, we lacked prior experience in having built and launched any kind of production-ready software. We reached out to developer mentor i wish to credit; Rehema Wachira, who introduced us to a software development process that helps us work effectively as a team and ship features faster.We are now slowly achieving clarity in the building stage and we believe once we get it right, we will be able to ship better products to the end user.
Every time you are stuck in a task for too long, it shows a lack of clarity.
Establish processes that drive clarity
When faced with a huge task, it’s better to break it down into small manageable tasks. This is the epicenter of the Scrum framework. Rather than saying we’re working on the back-end, break it down into small user stories. This clarity improves shared understanding and workflow.
It is highly advisable to develop clarity before undertaking a project. Planning and putting processes in place will help you move faster and get more things done in less time.
The first step is always the hardest; but once you attain clarity in how to execute, you will be able to quickly launch products at twice the speed.
When you get into your car, you have a starting place and a destination. The map or GPS gets you from where you are to where you want to be. Clarity is where you want to be. Every choice you make behind the wheel will either get you closer to your destination, or further away. To further the analogy, the GPS or map is your mentor or guide that shortens the learning curve, therefore you’re not driving around in circles. And the fuel is your why.
Every aspect of your product should be clear. What exactly is the objective? What problems are you solving and who are you solving it for?
A company that comes to mind that is ultimately clear and anti-fragile would be Zoom Video Communications. They had a single goal of making video conferencing better despite the many existing huge competitors in the market. The result was a product with great user experience. The product just works.
When a majority of people were forced to work from home due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Zoom emerged as the go-to video conferencing tool for companies, groups and even governments. A product as beautiful as theirs doesn’t happen by chance.
It was a result of them attaining clarity from the start of the problem they wanted to solve and aligning all their processes towards that goal. A simple engineering feature; making sure their server capacity never exceeds 50% so as to prevent videos from lagging during high usage times; shows their obsession on making sure they solve their consumers’ needs.This gives them an edge over their competitors.
Lastly, innovation itself involves improving on already existing processes and making them better to deliver results more efficiently. The assumption that innovation is purely about adding lots of things; bells and whistles, isn’t justified.
Sometimes innovation can be about taking things away.
It can be whispering when everyone else is screaming.
