In competitive environments, winners make big bets by challenging norms.
“Only those who attempt the absurd can achieve the impossible.”
The last thing you want to do is be stuck in a herd, all building the same solutions. In saturated markets with no differentiator, you will eventually find yourself in a price race with everyone else… to the bottom.
So how to escape from the competitive herd?
(Check out the great book from Youngme Moon on this topic).
Bet big. Your product roadmap should have a few big bets a year. (If your roadmap is all big bets, you might have a different set of problems).
Solve a problem for your users in a way that no one else is solving it. This can be doing something 3-4x more efficiently than others. This can be taking an entirely different approach. A mobile phone with no buttons. Mailing DVD rentals to your home. Ranking ads not just by bid to top, but also click through rate. Tapping into citizens to use their own cars as taxis. Or to deliver food. Or to rent out their homes. Selling electric vehicles direct to consumer. The list goes on. And when competitors figure out what’s going on… well sometimes they try to lobby the government to stop you. But almost always, they get left behind in the dust.
Good execution, however, is highly dependent on good planning. Let’s take a sample set of projects we’d like to accomplish this year, with some engineering estimates:
You can see your big bets will eat a lot of the roadmap, and teams with different estimates will be dependent on each other. You have a bunch of some small bets. How do we execute all this while keeping thrash down across teams?
You should stack your projects so teams end up near the finish line at roughly the same time. This saves QA cycles on end-to-end testing, and also prevents code from sitting there for too long on a branch. Here is method to stack your projects so timelines align. You can also kick off your year with small quick wins to show some progress and build morale.
You can see how each pod can focus on one project at a time, which will reduce context switching and allow them to focus and finish more quickly. You can balance the end of a project (Big Bet A), to allow a smooth transition to the next project (Big Bet B) for individual pods, even if the timelines don’t exactly end at the same time. You have also found some downtime for Pod 4 from March - May, which is a great opportunity to pay down some tech debt, work on another project, or share resources (if possible) to assist other pods. Similarly, Pod 4 and Pod 3 will have some additional bandwidth in Q4.
This of course assumes that certain projects weren’t time critical. But roadmaps can be easily balanced based on any number of factors.
It takes inventors and builders who can think outside the box to do impossible things. They are unafraid to challenge norms, and will often be irreverent and contrarian. Their ideas will be ridiculed, usually by people who don’t actually build things.
“If people are not laughing at your goals, your goals are too small.”
But their biggest commonality: their roadmaps will be filled with big bets.
So make room among the features that everyone is asking for, the bugs that need to be fixed, and the tech debt that needs to be paid down. Put a big bet that solves a problem for your users in a way that no one has ever thought of.
Most importantly, surround yourself with creators who are optimistic and innovative. Be honest about your mission and your vision, and do your best to retain those who will commit to you. With a great team, you will motivate each other to reach heights you never could have imagined.