Can you even build what you say you will?

What makes a world class product organization? Internally and externally, we’ve stated the desire to be just that. We have stated objectives and key results that roll up to this goal. Everything we do should be a step to getting us closer to that objective. “World class” is nebulous, but that’s how objectives should be — big and audacious, not small and defined within small parameters.

Why does being world class really matter? Our thesis for the future of the gig economy requires software, and for the most part — software companies have international competition. Sometimes, a company even leaves their backyard to focus on a market where innovation within the gig economy typically starts.

As a Product Manager, one of my contributions to achieving this objective can be derived from a rhetorical question made by Jeff Morris during a recent interview:

“Can you actually build what you say you want to?”

This is a question that I think many product teams don’t take as seriously as they should. We all focus on understanding our customers, exploring assumptions, formulating bets, identifying success metrics, etc. And these are all important to varying degrees. But if you can’t ever actually deliver, you’re burnt toast. And if you can deliver, but it’s slow, infrequent and inefficient — your likelihood of being burnt toast is high.

Personally, I translate the ability to “build what you say you want to” into two parts:

1. Ability to break down an idea
2. Ability to execute efficiently

In this post I am going to talk about #2 (#1 could be a future post).

Rewinding to 12 months ago, Moves was an idea. We believed we could solve a problem faced by the growing and massively underserved gig economy. Moves was also a pivot for the team, and a pretty big one. Before Moves we did not build consumer applications, heck, we didn’t have a product design team!

But we did, and continue to have, a lot of ambition.

Since then, our ambition has evolved. We’ve grown our narrative, created countless Figma prototypes and have started growing our little nugget of a product.

But, the question remains — can we actually build what we say we want to, and in an efficient way?

We still have a long way to go, but every other Monday I find myself thinking this release was our biggest yet. I jokingly started calling big releases a ‘Monster Launch™’, and the bar for that label keeps getting higher.

What we have learned:

• Embrace the no-code revolution. Tools like Segment, Braze, Airtable, Amplitude, Iterate, Zendesk, etc have created massive efficiencies in our processes. We now constantly have survey responses coming in, recruitment for customer interviews is no longer a two-week effort and we have lightweight mechanisms to test features and narratives in-app. We also have great visibility into our app usage and all user communications. This visibility enables quick decisions, a clearer understanding of the underbelly of our product, more effective interviews and more.
• Default to buying instead of building. One of our biggest mistakes of the first half of 2021 was we tried building too many components of our product. Auth0 for authentication, Argyle for employment data, Unit for banking as a service, and Braze for marketing automation are all decisions that accelerated velocity and allowed us to stay focused on our core value proposition: getting gig workers back on the road.
• Embrace asynchronous rituals. Like most others, we’re a remote-first company given COVID-19. Once we realized that forcing in-person rituals and activities into Zoom was a losing battle, our efficiencies skyrocketed. We now do asynchronous design reviews via video walkthroughs, asynchronous grooming to cut up tickets, a Slack channel for each epic (eg, shippable body of work) and more.
• Empower everyone. We realized that one of the major blockers to unlocking better velocity was that at any given time we only had one epic being worked on and groomed. We’ve parallelized these efforts by creating a dedicated feature lead for each epic. Not only does this allow us to take on many things at once, but another amazing by-product is the sense of ownership this has placed on every team member.

Our processes are evolving, and we have many improvements to make. “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems” is a quote by James Clear that resonates, and we will continue to work on our systems until we become the world class company we strive to be.

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