You’re Iterating to Nowhere
Some teams are unstoppable. They are driven by an unseen force to continually produce and deliver value. These teams appear to require less effort and coordination than typical teams, yet they deliver more. As I have worked with more teams, I have noticed a commonality between teams that consistently produce business value: shared vision.
Teams working towards a shared vision require less day-to-day managerial input and have a higher chance of delivering what you expect. All team members understand what they are working towards and why. The shared vision empowers each team member to make better decisions independently.
Teams without a vision are adrift. They can iterate forever and achieve nothing.
I have an analogy I use to conceptualize vision and relate it to smaller, more tactical goals. I share this with every manager who’s worked for me, and I love discussing the concept with experienced managers to get their take.
What do I mean by Vision?
First I want to define two terms useful for our discussion. The difference is subtle, yet highly important.
Vision: a mental image of what the future could be like.
Goal: an aim or desired result.
I use vision to mean a grander more idealistic state, and probably not something we can achieve in a short amount of time. Goals are specific desired results, they may be big or small, but they are attainable. Here is a concrete example:
Vision: Build the best team collaboration platform.
Goal: Allow notes to be shared between at least five concurrent users via secret URLs.
The vision I chose is larger, far larger, than the goal. The vision isn’t specifically actionable, but it is guiding. For example, “mining Bitcoin” does not move us closer to realizing our vision.
The goal is actionable and attainable. It spells out something specific that I can achieve. It also supports the vision, but is probably insufficient to fully realize the vision.
Golf, What?
To better explain the difference, I like to use the analogy of a golf course. Imagine you are playing golf and that you are standing on top of a hill with no idea where the hole is located:
That’s a team with no guiding vision. You can just pick a direction and start whacking the ball, or, in agile terminology, iterating. You’re iterating to nowhere. Maybe you’ll eventually happen across a hole, maybe it will be the right hole, maybe it will be the wrong hole, or maybe you’ll just whack away until you’re out of time.
A vision is like the pin in golf — it tells us where we’re trying to go. Once you point out the pin to a group, with no further input they will more or less head in the right direction. It might not be the most efficient or how you want to approach reaching your vision, errr, I mean the pin. But, they will go in the right general direction.
Here’s where the analogy gets really interesting. Remember, the flag is our vision. Let’s look at a map of a hole:
One approach would be to stand at the tee box, swing as hard as possible, and hope really hard that we get to the green. Another approach would be to just hit the ball and see where it goes, then repeat. Eventually you might get to the green with these approaches. Neither approach is efficient and consistently repeatable. They will be hard to predict — and, worse — they will be hard to measure progress as you’re going.
There’s a better way: make a plan.
Wait, what? That sounds like waterfall, and every good agilista knows that is bad. Very bad. Extremely, very bad.
No, not that kind of plan. Let’s use the concept of goals to discuss this. We can create a plan of decreasing fidelity. Back to the golf hole:
We know that on the first swing we need to make it across the rough and hopefully onto the fairway, within some margin of error. Our first target is the area highlighted in bright green above. Where we feasibly reach on swing two is entirely dependent on swing one, but since we have a rough idea of where we might land on swing one, we can make a plan:
Our plan is to get into the bright green circle (labeled 1), then from there into the red circle (labeled 2), then into the blue circle (labeled 3), and finally into the hole. Notice how each target-zone is progressively “fuzzier” (larger margin of error). After we take our first shot, we can update the plan accordingly.
We can repeat this process armed with our new information each time. With each attempt 1) we have a rough idea of where we should be, 2) we know if we’re getting badly off course, and 3) we can actually handle non-direct paths.
Let’s focus on item three. Sometimes the most direct path is not the best. This might be due to technical reasons, legal reasons, timing reasons, political reasons, a desire to deliver incremental value, etc. Sometimes, we need to make a more carefully constructed plan.
When building products, we don’t get a map in advance. We construct it based on a combination of our assumptions and feedback from users. Your Product Manager is doing their best to figure out what lies ahead and help plan the best course to realizing the larger vision. Your technical lead is estimating yardages and contributing to the strategy to avoid the obstacles.
Have You Ever Even Heard of Agile?
Yes, yes I have heard of agile. How does this fit with agile and not doing big plans? Our process is not about specifics. It is about giving strategic guidance. There is a well-known framework for managing this approach: OKRs. Also, if you are doing anything nontrivial, and you don’t know what you’re trying accomplish in the next three months, you are not going to get where you hoped to be. You’re just doing stuff, like the golfer whacking the ball around. No, I don’t care if you’re a startup. You can absolutely prioritize work based on new information, but you still need a guiding vision. You can even change your vision — that’s called pivoting.
Agile processes are excellent for planning, managing, and coordinating day-to-day tasks. You should use the concepts I suggest for bigger picture, strategic planning. One of my favorite quotes, “today’s gap represents a failure of planning sometime in the past,” is from High Output Management. Time and time again, I see projects that are badly off the rails. They’ve been scrumming the hell out of their sprints, and yet they’re failing to deliver value.
The problem is they are iterating to nowhere. Have you ever seen a project that is always two weeks away? Somehow every single week ends with the project remaining two weeks from completion. That’s because there’s been a core strategic planning failure — there is not clarity on where they’re trying to be.
Wrapping Up
How does this whole flow look together?
First, determine your high-level vision. What’s the ambitious guiding light everyone is working to make a reality? Think in a time-frame well over a year (maybe three to five years). If you’re a startup, this is what you are trying to “disrupt” or “be the Uber of.” If you’re an established business, this is probably something that is going to take you to the next level.
Next, you need to determine some key steps you currently think will help you realize that vision. Pick something, maybe three months out, that is pretty concrete. You should have a clear idea about this goal and it should be communicated with everyone on the team. These are the things needed to drive business results in about a quarter.
Pick a couple longer term, fuzzier goals for yourself and the product leadership team (product managers, tech leads, UX staff). You can change these medium range goals — they aren’t set in stone. In fact, they are what your product manager and UX people are trying to validate. These do not need communicated to the entire org.
Remember, none of the goals should (generally) specify anything about implementation — they are meant to give the teams guidance while they are planning implementation, but leave them free to figure out how to hit the goal.
Use whatever denomination of agile you like to manage the day-to-day work that delivers your near-term goal. I suggest using OKRs to create, discuss, and track the higher-level goal process. Over time, you will have a consistent, repeatable process for delivering software and value to your customers.
Contact us if you are interested in help improving your strategic planning process.