Controllable Pain Now Vs. Uncontrollable Pain Later
Don't Let Your Darlings Kill Your Darlings
“Why are things moving so slowly?”.
That inevitable question everybody Product Manager has to hear. Over and over again.
There must be a better way and the answer is obvious.
When you examine such a situation closely, it usually means the same underlying problem is making everything worse.
It doesn’t mean it’s the only problem and you don’t have other obstacles on your path.
But this problem is typically one of the main culprits: high Work In Progress (WIP). Your company or team is trying to work on too many different things at the same time.
I want to stress trying, because for all the effort everyone everyone is putting in there will be very little to show for.
High Work In Progress is like trying to move fast when you’re stuck in a traffic jam. High WIP sucks all the air out of the room and sabotages collaboration and nearly every interaction.
High WIP happens because nobody wants their darlings removed from the roadmap. They want to be able to point their finger on the roadmap and say their precious darling is on there.
In essence, high WIP is usually a strategic problem: we can’t make difficult choices about what matters the most across all teams.
Think: everybody has their unique darlings and there are no shared darlings.
When everything matters, everything will cannibalize everything and hence nothing really matters. Your darlings will fall off and take ages to complete.
The choice is guaranteed pain now or wishful thinking accompanied with delayed misery much later.
We delude ourselves with delayed misery. We choose to feel good about the present and settle with the delayed misery, hoping it won’t pan out. But it will.
Unfortunately the delay of misery is so great by the time it happens we have often forgotten what caused it in the first place: our fear of subtraction, darling attachment and loss aversion smacking us right in the face.
Ask your stakeholders a simple question: do you want controllable pain now or uncontrollable pain later?
Do you want control over what falls off or do you want to lose control over what won’t be finished?
When you frame it this way the answer becomes obvious: by reducing WIP you don’t lose anything but you’re regaining control.
Controlling your WIP means you won’t let your darlings duke it out: don’t let your darlings kill your darlings.
Do it yourself first.