Priorities, priorities, priorities.
So you’ve got some bunch of money. You have some amount of time. You also have stuff to get done.
Users need to use, developers need to develop, user researchers need to research users and we need to make sure what we build is actually useful. Adoption is crucial. Reputation is crucial. Communication is crucial. Crucial is crucial. Wait. Strike that last bit.
Deciding what to do and when to do it
Everything is important. But, some things are more important than others.
This is my rough guide on how to decide what matters.
Let us build a world…
Our vision, our new world
There it is. Our new world. A beautiful idea. So calm, so serene. It’s going to change peoples lives. Make things better.
Always have this at the forefront of your thinking. It helps orient you towards the goal you are setting out to achieve.
It’s especially useful when you are deep in the detail. Soar out of the jungle, up through the atmosphere and look back down from the cold, silence of space.
Test the idea.
Is it still a good one? Are you sure? Should we keep going?
Always ask those questions.
There may be a different way. It’s never wrong to be wrong. It’s better to be wrong early.
- Is it ‘A new discovery? A new idea?’
- Is it ‘Hold up, wait….let’s figure this out’?
- Is it ‘You know what, right now we are good’
- Is it ‘Somebody else has a better world, people should go there’
If you have doubts, share them with people who have an investment in the vision, they might have the same doubts. If they do, figure out how to answer them. Make this how you work. Questions and doubt should never be a surprise, but don’t let them be too much of a drag.
We don’t know is fine too.
You need to be comfortable with either answering or not answering the questions. Always try to ask the people that matter, those who would be residents of your new planet. When you can’t you have to put yourself in their place and take a leap of faith.
The Product
This is the physical implementation of your world.
Let’s drop down into the atmosphere. You mostly spend time between here and the lower reaches. Each feature or epic a continent, or country, floating sensibly on an ocean of possibility.
Which should we visit first? Where should be spend our effort sculpting and crafting the detail to bring the vision to life?
It’s important think of the context you’re operating in.
We want people to visit our new product planet, to buy into our new world, maybe it’s an existing world that needs to be rethought. Maybe it is an old world people need a way off of. These are all states your world will exist in at one point or another, you always need to think of this continuum.
How though?
Give the people what they want
When you are deciding what to build you should ask yourself
- Will this allow more people to join our new world?
- Will this make people want to stay?
- Are people waiting for this before they can join?
- Do we need to do this because another world is doing it better?
- What happens if we don’t build this now?
- Does this fit in with our vision?
- Does this make our world more difficult to complete?
- Does this make our world more expensive to join?
Lot’s of things are at play here, and depending on where you are in terms of your journey towards achieving your vision, you will have different answers to the above questions. You need to evaluate these things individually, then prioritise them accordingly. But you need a more complete picture of what is possible, and what might affect you.
External Forces
Beyond the ‘things’ that make up the world, there are external forces to consider too.
- Is it safe from attack by evil forces?
- Is it stable or could we be torn apart internally?
- Can people get here easily?
- Is anyone going to stop us?
- Do we depend on anything that could stop us?
People Building your World
That’s the world itself, but what about the people helping to build it?
- Does everyone understand what we are trying to achieve?
- Does everyone understand why we are focussing on the current ‘thing’?
There is so much more than that, but these are really important. Agreement isn’t what we are looking for, broadly having it is good, but it isn’t the main thing. People may disagree, they may challenge, this is healthy. It should be encouraged. Ensure though, that they understand why it is we are doing things the way we are right now.
If those challenges become more than that, then maybe you need to rethink your vision, maybe you need to explain things better or they need to rethink their place in building it.
The beautiful detail
We have made our choices! The decision is clear, work will commence on terraforming our new continent, we are ready to break new ground.
The devil is in the detail however. How do we know how to proceed?
- Consult your planners, your architects, your developers
- What if we don’t do a thing?
- Is this new, or is it a change to something we’ve done before?
- Have we done anything like this before?
- Has anyone else done this?
- What do we need to do first?
- What sequence can we do things in?
- Do we know enough to proceed?
- Can we make this decision?
- Does this work with what we’ve built before?
You also want to apply the questions you asked from higher up…does this still make sense? Does it help us achieve our vision? Do we make ourselves less safe? Does our world become less stable?
New work may emerge, boulders may have to be moved, cliffs dynamited, waterways dug. The same questions applied.
Armed with these questions, you’ll be well on your way to ‘building a better world’
Footnotes
The above is hopefully relatable when thinking about Product Management,
I’ll go into more detail on ideas like External Forces and Dependencies, specifically from a technical point of view in follow ups.
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