Here’s a real-world example (in fact the example which motivated the original essay). I was at a startup and there was this complicated feature we were working on for our app. I asked “Is this actually going to make us any money? Like, what’s the cause-and-effect process from this feature to profits?”. And nobody had any answer. There was no imagined chain from building that feature to making money; we had simply lost sight of the goal. We were building the feature because that was what we knew how to do, and making the app profitable was not something we knew how to do—we were looking for the metaphorical quarter under the streetlight.
Sure, feedback would have straightened us out eventually. We would have released the feature, no money would have been made. But that would have taken months. Noticing that the chain was broken was much faster.
Lost purposes is a common occurrence, definitely. And it looks like you had provided that feedback without waiting in the open loop until your customer give you the feedback. Your motivation was, or appeared to be based on a broken causal chain or something, but the resulting action was something that ought to have been built-in from the start: closing the loop early.
Here’s a real-world example (in fact the example which motivated the original essay). I was at a startup and there was this complicated feature we were working on for our app. I asked “Is this actually going to make us any money? Like, what’s the cause-and-effect process from this feature to profits?”. And nobody had any answer. There was no imagined chain from building that feature to making money; we had simply lost sight of the goal. We were building the feature because that was what we knew how to do, and making the app profitable was not something we knew how to do—we were looking for the metaphorical quarter under the streetlight.
Sure, feedback would have straightened us out eventually. We would have released the feature, no money would have been made. But that would have taken months. Noticing that the chain was broken was much faster.
Lost purposes is a common occurrence, definitely. And it looks like you had provided that feedback without waiting in the open loop until your customer give you the feedback. Your motivation was, or appeared to be based on a broken causal chain or something, but the resulting action was something that ought to have been built-in from the start: closing the loop early.