Starting with Planning is the Best Way to Sabotage Your Product – Do This Instead
The 3 things to do before you start to plan
“When we start by intricately planning out heavyweight “Initiatives,” the leap is simply too great for our company to build the right things in the right way, directly connected to real customer needs.”
Welcome back to the latest edition of the Upstream, Full-Stack Journal, the only resource that goes upstream to deliver effectively across the full Value Delivery stack.
How’s everyone doing with their Personal Strategy?
Ready to revisit your “What Would Have to be True?” conditions and iterate?
In this edition:
The 3 things we need to do before we plan
The elegant simplicity of strategy
Let’s jump in!
Starting with a Plan is Wrecking Your Product. Here’s How Winning Starts with Strategy.
Only Creativity & Strategy allow us to break free of Planning’s iron grip
I’ve been consulting in Product Discovery, Design, Delivery, and Management for over 20 years, and planning seems to be the only mode that gives people a sense of control.
Literally everything relies on “The Plan.”
Large Legacy Enterprise organizations in highly-regulated verticals like financial services and healthcare are required by law to have plans, and are audited for compliance.
Which is ironic, because as we’ll see, traditional approaches that start with big, heavy, up-front planning more often than not result in failure.
The downsides of inflexible planning
I’ve successfully led multi-million dollar efforts with 20+ person teams building large, complex applications in heavily regulated spaces, and have seen it all.
I’m also twice-certified in strategy and goal-setting, and always found strategy came naturally to me.
Despite the intense push in every situation toward planning, I always felt a natural affinity with the importance of going upstream and starting from strategic choice-making.
It never made sense to me how some colleagues insisted on starting with laying out the most intricate and elaborate plans.
They frequently ignored the human element of the people they were collaborating with to do the work, refusing to listen or respond as conditions changed.
Worse, they would rarely, if ever put any thought at all into the clients on the receiving end of the work.
The Traditional Approach to Failure
A large study revealed traditional delivery approaches that start with big, heavy, up-front planning lead to failure in the majority of cases.
The same research uncovered that iterative, strategy-based approaches had proven to provide far greater opportunities for better outcomes.
What is it that starting with planning causes us to miss?
Why does it matter?
What are the differences?
Planning
Planning is an
Internally-focused,
Analytical approach
Focused on making the most of things within our control:
Our People
Time
Resources
With the goal of optimizing for efficiency.
To produce some end result we think should achieve our internal goals.
Strategy
Strategy, on the other hand, is a
Client-centric,
Creative
Problem-solving framework
Focused on making choices to influence something out of our control:
Customer behavior
With the goal of optimizing for effectiveness.
In ways that mean success both for our clients, as well as for our business.
The value of strategy
Every year, business schools churn out tens of thousands of MBAs trained in internal and analytical-based thinking.
It’s not surprising, then, that planning becomes the dominant mindset across most companies.
But that doesn’t mean all companies ignore strategy.
In fact, a core competency in designing differentiating strategies forms the foundation of many of the world’s most-loved, successful, and lasting products and service businesses.
What sets these strategy-focused businesses apart?
An emphasis on great client experiences.
The 3 Things before you Plan
But starting with a plan unleashes a chain of events that makes it almost impossible to keep user needs front and center throughout the Product Discovery and Delivery process.
But if Strategy is the key to effective action, in what ways can we shift to better support moving from our strategy to reality, if not planning?
There are three key elements that need to be in place before we’re ready to plan:
#1: Uncover the Client Problem
#2: Collaboratively Design Choices
#3: Map People and Potential
Read the full piece on my blog here.
Note on the images
Wanted to extend my thanks to my collaborator,Andy McNally. He has a great Substack newsletter, too!
I think he’s one of the most talented sketchnote artists and illustrators out there. Check out his images from last week’s CES, and you’ll know exactly what I mean.
Andy’s pretty busy, but if you’re looking for someone with Andy’s unique style, reach out and he may be able to help draw something cool for you, too.
The Elegant Simplicity of Strategy
The hard part is the _not_ doing
That wraps things up for this edition!
Join me next time as we continue to go upstream and use strategy, goal-setting, and product management to make you more effective.
Everything starts with customers and their needs (pains) simply because customers are the ones a business works for. I've thought a lot why this idea is both obvious and hard to learn for many. I've come to think that solving internal problems and talking to colleagues, not to customers, is a psychological comfort zone.