Andy Johns (ex-Wealthfront, Quora, Facebook) and Matt Greenberg (ex-Credit Karma) have shipped numerous big, complicated, high risk, high reward product bets. They say the dirty secret of Silicon Valley is that most great product teams follow a system that resembles waterfall (gasp!) to launch new innovative features/products repeatably. The system starts with high conviction based on judgment, intuition, and instinct rather than relying on iterative customer feedback to build conviction over time.
That is a little counter to the narrative around "Lean" and "Agile" that try to remove complexity through short development timelines and small iterations. But Matt and Andy make a good point:
"When creating and managing the system, the common tendency is try and remove complexity entirely. But this is impossible. There will always be a level of uncertainty involved in executing innovative and uncertain strategic ideas. Creating product-changing wins involves taking higher-risk, longer-term bets. Instead, you need to accept the uncertainty by building processes that manage complexity, increase conviction, and reduce risk over time."
Scaling product delivery is challenging because execution is very rarely a clean straight line. In practice, so many things can derail you on the path from strategic idea to outcome:
Uncertainty muddies what the path forward will entail - it's unclear how much time it will take to build, what you'll need to build, or what other dependencies you'll face.
Risks manifest that derail your efforts, such as facing a customer support constraint or losing access to a dependency team.
Misalignment occurs that can prevent you from moving forward.
Cannibalization is created because actions that you take in one area of the product have effects on other areas and can detract from one another.
The larger scale the project the more ambiguity there is in strategic decisions and tactical tradeoffs. Engineers especially are trained to find the "right" answer. Leaders get bogged down in trying to make the best decision but increase the time you spend on the wrong decisions. You've probably experienced a discussion similar to "This is 3% better than that." But the real discussion is, does this matter?
“High-performing product teams don't religiously subscribe to one tool for all problems. They recognize that through a company's lifetime, different problems arise that each requires a different tool.”
Matt and Andy created a Reforge program on Scaling Product Delivery for product and engineering leaders. You can join them in the upcoming Spring cohort.
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