Speedboats & ocean freighters
One gets a small team up to speed quickly and turns on a dime, the other needs space and time to get going or change direction, but smashes through ocean swells and moves tons of goods.
They are different boats for doing different work.
Which do you need to get the job done?
Momentum Matters
“Occasionally, scaling down and intensifying gives you the big advantage”
~ Charlie Munger
Big impact sometimes requires a big complex program, but not always. Products live and die by momentum.
Physics terms get casually tossed about when discussing projects: team velocity, friction, resistance to adoption, escape velocity. Momentum, however, is one concept from physics which aptly applies to leading a product program and troubleshooting when it’s not working well. Have you ever…
Increased the size of a team, only to have a program grind to a halt?
Needed to change direction, and sometimes found it quick and other times laborious (or impossible)?
Made feature or scope cuts to a Product and felt progress accelerate?
A quick rehash on the physics of Momentum from Wikipedia:
In Newtonian mechanics, momentum is the product of the mass and velocity of an object. It is a vector quantity, possessing a magnitude and a direction. If m is an object's mass and v is its velocity (also a vector quantity), then the object's momentum p (from Latin pellere "push, drive") is:
Physics of Product
m: mass. Scope and scale of the product and its team. Leaders sense this. It’s resources allocated, features specified, promises made, dreams yet unshattered.
v: velocity. Directional speed at which things are completed. Everybody feels this. It’s milestones hit or missed, schedule brought in or pushed out, a work item that never quite leaves the standup, or the Executive who’s either happily surprised at progress or pissed he’ll get roasted at the board meeting. Direction matters; lots of speed pointed the wrong way makes momentum a problem.
p: momentum. Resiliency to obstacles, increasing intensity, and a sense of inevitability. This is tougher to pin down, but the Product Leader benefits from attuning to it. Increasing momentum feels good, as you can blast through challenges. Decreasing momentum feels like losing pace of progress, little obstacles causing big disruptions, or resources getting pulled away. Vectors matter.
Increasing momentum
Boost speed. Optimize communication and resources, and the team gets more done faster.
Add resources. Inject capital and put it to work. Sometimes things can slow down in transient, but this is OK because you can increase velocity once work is allocated to that new resource set.
Cut complexity. Kill features and scope to better use your team, or cut teamwork overhead.
Losing momentum
Too much complexity. Team is avoiding cuts to Product or scope creep has not been dealt with.
Communications are overloaded. Too many meetings and updates, not enough work getting done.
Insufficient resources to overcome momentum loss. Undercapitalized, or the right people are not working on your project. Lots of losses happen when the wrong people are involved.
Originally published on productbriefly.com
So how do we use momentum?
This might sound complicated, but it’s not. That doesn’t mean it’s not sometimes difficult, but we can make it easier. It comes down to two things:
Adjusting momentum to suit the situation
Directing the momentum you have to work for you not against you
Let’s dig into some practical ways to approach these.
