Roadmaps without any long-term thinking
Roadmaps without any long-term thinking
It is about everyone pushing in the same direction
Thanks to slightly more frequent changes of jobs on my side, I have seen quite a number of ‘agile’ companies by now.
And I guess I won’t reveal anything new by saying 98% of them sucked at plans, goal setting and coordinating efforts between teams.
I had a moment there when lots of my designer acquaintances started sharing Brian Chesky’s recent slightly crazy remarks about designers running companies and ‘understanding’ what the company sells.
Suddenly, the PM function got removed, and the company started to consider itself liberated and one-directional, thanks to Brian. Obviously, it is a Hippo move, and we will start seeing it sooner or later.
He went so far in that interview that even thinking about it makes me boil but who am I to judge? Time will tell who’s wrong.
The one thing my excited designer pals forget about, and what Brian says frankly, is that he is not a designer, not a typical one that is. He builds the business, and he rips the cherries by saying what needs to be done, that’s a HIPPO right there.
But at times, it is necessary if the company happens to be full of ‘bright’ PMs pulling into different directions but trying to build their own features to make their portfolios brighter.
That is, we take a democratic company delegating the goal settings and the OKRs to the teams themselves.
Quite liberating, isn’t it?
While I love the concept, it means my OKRs are things I want to do, no matter the thinking behind them. I can craft stats any way I want to.
Moreover, I have seen companies building OKRs on top of those, synthesising an artificial North Star ‘idea’ (it wasn’t a metric really or anything feasible) to satisfy the lower levels of employees. So suddenly, the sum of our non-coordinated attacks on the map was becoming a whole thanks to the generals above us.
They wanted a coherent story they could love so they crafted one.
Five different focus points became “Improvements of the UX” or “Expansions into the US”. It got really creative I must admit.
So, while I find Brian’s ideas damaging in the long run, he gets the goal-setting right - the centralized OKRs or whatever they call it make people aligned on stuff they contribute to, the idea.
They reframe the map and show the direction to hit.
The liberation comes under a different sauce of PM independence, who are supposed to think of conventional and original ideas to reach that enemy’s base. Considering the resources, other teams, skills and the wins expected.
While the driver similar to Brian may be extremely wrong and the whole company falls down after a brief period of time, there is a lesson here.
Directionless companies no matter the framework or style get stuck in feature assembly lines unable to look beyond 2-3 next sprints coming up. I have definitely seen it a lot.
And if your thinking is short-term, every change hurts so we stop taking risks and building stuff that takes longer than one quarter.
Consider mixing up PMs, POs and UX people within weird PODs (for those who haven’t heard Spotify ain’t using those anymore) and you end up having small armies of people following their own agendas.
There will be B-players satisfying everyone and everything.
These people won’t say NO no matter the circumstances.
There will be A-players building their portfolio and trying to switch to sexy things, sexy things they can sell when they are done with the company (nothing wrong here, PM is supposed to be a mercenary).
If the company tends to fire people, there will be a very small group of C-players who got there by accident or loyalty.
If there is no leaderboard, there will be lots of those people. Who happen to have no skills, no economy/product background, and can’t count properly. C’s and B’s make A’s leave quickly but that’s a topic for another day really.
All that means there will be rivers of silos between teams, each building stuff they like.
Final thoughts to close this short entry - the situation gets better if the level of teams is constantly levelled, even by firing C’s and B’s.
Directionless companies spend a ton of dough to build tracking tools, for expensive roadmapping software and priceless Jira extensions.
You have to get only one thing right (it doesn’t have to be right from the beginning, you can and you will pivot after some time) but that thing will make your tools less important, the ‘lean’ roadmap can be built with NotePad+ and believe me, it won’t make a difference.
We used to tell oral stories without writing them down. Some of them, those of value and meaning, are still with us.
So are things we have built.
Obvious, right?
Well, not for everyone.
I am still burning inside after that Airbnb’s presentation but who am I to judge a successful company (for now)?
Hippo’s used to work back in the day. Ford, Leland, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Sloan, Kamprad.
Perhaps, some form of authoritarianism can make a difference both ways.