Be Pulled Into Complexity
Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash
Big ideas are exciting — they motivate people. It’s why it’s can be easier to build an ambitious company than a modest one. But once the real work of building begins, we have to constrain ourselves. Breaking the 12-course meal in our mind into entrees, appetizers, and desserts.
Yet too often, even these smaller bites are so big we choke. Just as we are bad at estimating how long something will take to build, we whiff on how many pieces are required to complete the user’s job, end-to-end.
A cohesive experience is farther away than we think because our perfect plan is imperfect. Not only will we miss stuff we should have caught, but some work can’t be seen until it’s right on top of us. There are corners we can’t peer around. Given this reality, work tends towards the additive, so if you don’t start very small, you’ll never end up with simple. By starting smaller than we’d like, we leave space for the eventual complexity to arrive, and boy does it. Just ask your engineering team.
“No plan survives contact with the enemy” — Helmuth von Moltke the Elder
The equivalent of the 3rd rail in product management is to tell engineering you think something should be ‘easy’. It’s a faux pas as developers know the complexity that lies under the hood — nothing is as simple as it looks on the surface. As my dad used to say, “everything is easy to the man who doesn’t have to do it himself.”
The best antidote to this issue is to constrain the initial build of your vision, but it’s hard to know just how much you should pull back. Features always sound so delicious! One trick I use to determine if I’m on the right track is discomfort.
Once I start feeling uncomfortable, that we don’t have enough, I know I’m getting closer to the right scope line. If I feel confident, with all my bases covered, then I have too much in the product. Fewer features and options for users are safe bets early on — more work always emerges.[1] Scope decided later is better scope — it has the benefit of time and experience.
“The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.” — Tom Cargill, Bell Labs
If you start big, you’ll end up huge. Nothing ends up simple that starts complex. That means if you tackle too much at the outset, you’ll ship an unfinished product or you won’t finish at all. So limit what you start with, err on a level of simplicity that makes you feel you’re missing something.
Be pulled into complexity.
Footnotes:
[1]: In early products and features, less has an additional advantage of testing value. Users who use something despite its shortcomings are a great signal of value. Delaying launch or stuffing too much into an initial release diminishes this signal.
