Matt LeMay: commitment

Transcript context

…The Low Impact Death Spiral is the dynamic in which every- ... impact death spiral is the dynamic in which every medium to large company I've ever worked with finds itself in one way or another. And honestly, a lot of small product companies do as well, and it goes something like this. It starts with teams taking on low impact work. Adding little features here and there, making little cosmetic improvements because it's easier, it invites less scrutiny and you're less likely to mess up something important, right? The analogy I use sometimes is if you're working on a car, if you put your hands in the engine, you might make the car run really well or you might make it so that the car doesn't run at all. If you have the option of doing that or decking out the car with a paint job and rhinestones and making it look really, really cool, what are you going to choose to do? I know for me, I would choose the rhinestones every time because then the car runs however it runs. Whoever else is the expert in engines can fix the engine, but I'm going to do this thing which everyone can see. All the executives can look at it and say, "Wow, look at how cool this car looks," and it's not going to do any harm, right? What's the worst that could happen? We can always take the paint off. The problem is if you have 10 teams adding rhinestones to a car, eventually the hood of the car is going to be so heavy that you can't lift it to get to the engine anymore, and that's exactly what happens in most product organizations. As you have more and more teams adding in these little features, making little enhancements, adding features, which might get some usage, but they're not going to take away anything meaningful, they're not going to mess with the commercial engine of the business. You have more folks building in and the hood of the car gets heavier and heavier, the product gets more and more complicated. You have all these little bits that have little dependencies on each other and the product becomes as, I think most modern products are a collection of loosely connected features rather than a single guided experience. What does that mean? That means internally, building anything becomes a lot harder, right? Because there's 10 product teams that have to manage dependencies whenever you want to build something, so companies start adding program management layers. They're like, "We have too many meetings. We need to reorg for program management because reorgs fix everything and we need to make sure that we have all these layers and people are connected and we're doing dependency management." But as you add more of those things, it becomes harder and harder to do high-impact work. The hood just gets heavier and heavier and heavier, which in turn sends teams deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole of low-impact work. Low-impact work begets low-impact work. to do high-impact work. The hood just gets heavier and heavier and heavier, which in turn sends teams deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole of low-impact work. Low-impact work begets low-impact work. The more low-impact work you do, the harder it is to do high-impact work, the more likely you are to do low-impact work and so on and so forth. It goes and goes and goes until the next round of layoffs, and this is a real problem. I've experienced this at again, pretty much every company I've worked with, and it's been really interesting to see how often the breaking of that cycle comes down to individual product teams being brave enough to look at their own work and look at what matters to the business and say, "You know what? We are not going to incur the risk of being a low-impact team anymore. We are going to proactively seek out high- impact work and we're going to deliver, even if it means we have to coordinate with a lot of other teams. Even if it means that suddenly the executive team takes a really big interest in the work that we're doing. We're going to see that as signs that the work we're doing matters not as things that are going to be an impediment to getting the work done." As you just kind of alluded to, there's a big implication here of even if you are told to build a thing that the execs are really excited about, that is low impact in your opinion, that's no excuse. You're still going to get fired eventually, even though they're telling you to build it. It sucks, but that's how it goes.…

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