The complexity of an initiaitive
What customers see implemented is probably the 5% of the work behind
I’ve just come back from a trip to Egypt where I had the pleasure of contemplating at least 3000 thousand years of history. It is gorgeous and astonishing at the same time.
Although, on our way back to the hotel after visiting the pyramids, temples, and museums; I was reflecting about the finished work made by the Egyptians and the history behind every piece of art.
The tour guide emphasised a lot the level of engineering and precision when building the tombs and pyramids, and how advanced the techniques they used were, for the time they were living and the resources available.
If you compare that to the product world, most of the customers who use your product every single day are clueless of the “history” behind, number of discussions, decisions and iterations that it got to get the work finished
I’m nowhere near the Egyptians when building products. Theirs would be much more successful and attract 10x number of customers than mine. Nonetheless, I wanted to reflect on the millions of steps to build something, the journey, and the post from
about Premature Convergence
Below you can see a Miro board with an initiative that started on Nov’21 and is about to see the light next year:
Some people might be asking, “are you kidding me?”, “More than a year spent on an initiative that hasn’t been launched yet?”, “What a waste of resources!!!”.
Some food for thought on how to think about the history and finished work of an initiative to avoid premature convergence.
Time: you need to carve out time to discovery behind the value proposition and unfair advantage. If you offer the same at a higher price, no one will ever switch or change to your product. That was made Egyptians unique, no on has ever built something similar.
Alignment: you must have a clear end in mind of what you want to achieve. You risk to have shaky foundations and then is likely that it will fall apart. The Egyptians knew that they had to build the pyramids from inside-out, not the other way around and it’s going to be used for burying the pharaoh.
Discovery time: I think is obvious that this type of work requires people to start together, but it’s even more important that you carve out time to run discovery cycles and avoid committing early on. Sometimes you need to go deep, then zoom out to understand that this is not the right path. The more you spend with something, especially at the beginning, the more you sharpen your product sense. The Egyptians evolved their techniques on how to build the pyramids, first it was just a “bastava”, then a pile of “bastavas”, then they built the first stepped pyramid, to end up building the triangle pyramids we know today.
Fixed / Enabling constrains: it’s true that we cannot spend, as other type of products required, endless amount of time to finally discovered it’s not going to work. We must be aware when it is supposed to be ready but having the flexibility of having multiple options available so you don’t lock yourself on a straight-jacket. The Egyptians knew the tomb / pyramid must be ready before the pharaoh passes away, but they have the flexibility to design the space to store their belongings, food, and more.
Dependencies: in our case we depend on another initiative to be ready. Make sure to coordinate any dependency and know the level of certainty you need in order to commit to the specific outcome. Egyptians didn’t have this problem at all. Avoid it if you can. If you cannot, make sure to align on it and coordinate the efforts.
Conclusion
As we famous phrase goes, “Rome wasn’t built in a day”. The same goes for the initiatives you build. You will face so many temptations to converge prematurely. Sometimes for stakeholders pressure, sometimes for other reasons.
The foundations are the time you dedicate to do discovery, explore different options, and align on the outcome you want to achieve, and how that will deliver the impact you expect.