Is it worth the investment?
The customer outcome and business value have to justify the work.
My work has taken me from social impact and development finance to medtech and enterprise software.
Better product bets.
Before I say yes, I want three things to be clear.
What are we giving up?
Every yes takes time and attention away from something else.
What would change my mind?
I want to know when to continue, change course or stop.
Worth Building?
Five notes on difficult product decisions.
01
02
03
04
05
When customer need, technical reality and business value disagree, who wins?
Customer · Technology · Business
Your biggest customer is a great sensor and a terrible product manager.
Customer signal · Reuse · Long term cost
Being early is only useful if being early buys you something.
Timing · Learning · Risk
Good opportunities create more product damage than bad ideas.
Focus · Distraction · Complexity
Challenge engineering at the decision boundary, not the implementation boundary.
Engineering · Tradeoffs · Constraints
Decisions in practice
Three times I changed the direction of the work.
Clarity before delivery
I reset the plan before we built the wrong thing.
I inherited a project with approved requirements, but the team and customer did not share the same understanding. Continuing would have protected the date and put the product at risk.
I stopped development for two weeks, returned to the customer and rebuilt agreement around the problem, scope and expected outcome.
Three weeks later than planned.
The customer approved a product that solved the right problem.
Outside work
What stays with me outside work.
Favourite book
Man’s Search for Meaning
Viktor E. Frankl
Currently reading
Misbehaving
Richard H. Thaler
On repeat lately