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When your team’s mission is vague

(you learn a lot about failure)

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About this team

  • A team of six people - 3 engineers, a designer, a product manager, and a tester
  • Our mission: build a new product targeted at fixing issues customers had with the current product
  • Our strategy: embrace lean product, be a small balanced team, and do the right research

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What could go wrong?

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Failure #1 analysis paralysis

In which we research endlessly with no real goal

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How it feels

  • Frustrating - impossible to get work done
  • Overwhelming
  • Decisions keep being delayed “until we know more”

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How it ended

  • Cost: 2 months
  • Progress: ~25 interviews but no direction
  • One person left the team

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Failure #2 indecision

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How it feels

  • Stressful to balance delivering quickly with doing quality work you can trust
  • Often going back on a decision and rethinking it
  • Lacking internal confidence on the work you’ve delivered

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How it ended

  • Took another 3 months before we could start building
  • Lost another team member

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Failure #3 not asking for help

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How it feels

  • Worried your work will be shut down any moment
  • You dread check ups with stakeholders
  • It’s us against the world - nobody can help us

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How it ended

  • Once we started opening the communication channels, it took a long time to get our stakeholders on board with the decisions we made

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That’s a lot of fail

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So next time you’re struggling with a vague mission

Am I doing it right?

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Remember

  • When given a vague mission, you won’t get anywhere until you clarify what success looks like

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Along the way...

  • Know why you’re doing the work
  • Trust your past self and their decisions
  • Ask for help

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Thanks for listening

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Failure = learning, right?

  • This team moved on to find new opportunities to fail and learn
  • Two other teams have started to explore big new ideas on Tracker
  • Tracker now has a formal stakeholder group that meets with teams to check in and set expectations

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About me

  • Beginner hockey player
  • Engineer on Pivotal Tracker
  • In the past year or so I have been involved in product research as well as traditional engineering work

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Twitter: @jeanettehead17