I recently got a chance to interview a couple people about this who’d done product management or similar at bay area tech companies.
They agreed that you can’t run projects there unless you project near-certainty the project will succeed. However, they had a trick that had failed to occur to me prior to them saying it, which is to find a mid-scale objective that is all of: a) quite likely to have at least a bit of use in its own right; b) almost certainly do-able; and c) a stepping-stone for getting closer to the (more worthwhile but higher-failure-odds) goal. And work towards your harder goal via stepping-stones such as these, when doing product management for groups.
I’ll be trying this out, probably. It reminds me of building modular code instead of spaghetti code.
Less confidently, I’d like to lightly recommend reading this blog post about Christopher Alexander’s notions of how to make buildings into places where humans like to be, and about analogous ideas for how to do good software design. I don’t have concrete take-aways to point to from that one, so read it at your own risk or don’t, but it seems to me there may be patterns like this to how to make goals and subgoals that groups can have morale/orientation while building.
I recently got a chance to interview a couple people about this who’d done product management or similar at bay area tech companies.
They agreed that you can’t run projects there unless you project near-certainty the project will succeed. However, they had a trick that had failed to occur to me prior to them saying it, which is to find a mid-scale objective that is all of: a) quite likely to have at least a bit of use in its own right; b) almost certainly do-able; and c) a stepping-stone for getting closer to the (more worthwhile but higher-failure-odds) goal. And work towards your harder goal via stepping-stones such as these, when doing product management for groups.
I’ll be trying this out, probably. It reminds me of building modular code instead of spaghetti code.
Less confidently, I’d like to lightly recommend reading this blog post about Christopher Alexander’s notions of how to make buildings into places where humans like to be, and about analogous ideas for how to do good software design. I don’t have concrete take-aways to point to from that one, so read it at your own risk or don’t, but it seems to me there may be patterns like this to how to make goals and subgoals that groups can have morale/orientation while building.