Smaller Plans: You Need Less Than You Thought

I got my first job at a design agency in 1996. We designed software products for technology companies. There weren’t many companies back then (pre-web) who did this work, and it was unusual for tech companies to hire design companies to work on their software. As a result, we needed to spend a lot of energy to justify the work that we were doing. One of the ways that we did that was by extolling our rigor. A typical project for us included a month of field research, followed by 2-4 weeks of wire-framing, followed by 4-12 weeks of detailed design. In other words, by the time we were done and ready to hand off our work, we’d spent months working on the blueprints that we handed off to developers.We were proud of how much work we did to get things right.

Around this time, I first saw an article about agile methods, specifically, a piece about Extreme Programming. What a name! In the studio, we mocked the whole idea endlessly, not least because the number one bogeyman of extreme programming was Big Design Up Front. They called it BDUF! How ridiculous to think that was the enemy! That was our entire existence!

And there you have it, in its infancy: the outline of an unavoidable and perpetual debate in the software world: how much work do you do before you start writing software? In the studio, we argued that you needed to build a rigorous plan. In the XP world, the argument was that software requires discovery, so you should start discovery immediately, and that the best discovery was actually writing software.

Of course, in most polarizing debates, there’s usually an element of truth on both sides.

Fast forward twenty years, and I’m having coffee with Lane Goldstone, one of my former studio-mates. Both of us have spent years since those studio days working to combine design-centric and agile ways of working. Lane, reasonable and thoughtful as always, said to me, “You know, we were right that the up-front work is important. But we were wrong about how much we needed. It turns out that you can get away with less than we thought. Much less.”

Getting Away With Less Than We Thought

I was thinking about this because last week I was teaching a unit on strategy to a group of Product Managers. With my colleague Jeff Gothelf, we focus the lesson on two questions, described in Roger Martin’s article The Big Lie of Strategic Planning. In the article, Martin says that the two critical questions that strategy must answer are, “Where will we play?” and, “How will we win?” 

Let me give you an example of these questions in action. Before I worked in the design studio, I worked at a company called Kensington. In those days, Kensington was a 40-person computer accessories company. When I joined the company in 1990, our strategy was simple. Where did we play? We made accessories for personal computers, and we sold those accessories through US retail channels. How did we win? We made a limited number of accessories, only entering categories where our product could be the best in the market, and for which we could charge a premium price. Our flagship product was a trackball—the best and most expensive on the market.

While I was working there though, something changed. The US market saw the rise of the big-box store. WalMart. Sam’s Club. These stores didn’t want to do business with lots of small suppliers. They wanted to deal with companies that could supply whole categories of products. They didn’t want our trackball. They didn’t care that it was the best in the world. They wanted to work with a supplier who could fill their mouse aisle. That meant supplying a $2.99 mouse, a $5.99 mouse, a $15.99 mouse, all the way up to our $99 trackball. 

In other words, there was a new player in our market, and if we wanted to stay competitive in this market, our strategy would have to change.

We could have re-thought our market, but the opportunity was too big to walk away. So our where-will-you-play didn’t actually change: we still made accessories for personal computers, and we still sold them in US retail channels.

But we had to change our how-will-you-win. It became: we make the best product at every price point in the categories that we enter.

Now, this may not seem obviously useful to you, but let me assure you that strategy, framed this way, is tremendously practical. It serves the kind of decisions you have to make in your day to day work. For example:

Should we launch this new product? 
Well, can it be the best at it’s price point?

Do we need another product in our line? 
Well, are we missing a price point? 

Should we change suppliers for this part? 
Well, will it make the product better without increasing the selling proice?

Strategy, like so much of what we do in business, can be inflated in order to justify the work. But at it’s essence, it’s simply a way of describing your approach to problem-solving. As I teach it, it’s a guiding policy to solve a problem. Where will you play / how will you win is useful because it can be the smallest thing that you need to articulate that policy. And it’s simple enough to use it moment-by-moment to make decisions. 

Thinking about strategy this way is, for most people, a revelation. It takes strategy—the elevated endeavor pursued by highly-paid consultants—and puts it back where it belongs. It’s just a guideline to for your decision-making process—and one that is applicable to you in your day to day work. 

In other words, you need it. You just need less of it than you think.