Negotiate internal workflow. Once you’ve got the answer that this is cool, now you step back and say, ‘What do I (have to) do to build it?’ It all starts with a high-level sketch, broad brushstrokes to come up with broad brush answers. How much money can I make from it? How much money is it going to cost me to do it? There’s my first broad brush.
If it survives that validation, now you go on to the next: What’s the timeline to go do it? Simultaneously to answering that question, you have to also answer the question: ‘What’s my timeline to bring it to market so that I can make the money that I just said I can get from it?’ There’s your next validation point.
Everything, at the end of the day, is a negotiation process. Sometimes, things are tradeoffs. Oftentimes, time and timelines play into it. Each component feeds the next component. So if this component winds up taking one and a half times longer than it was supposed to, it’s not a case that, well, it’s only one and a half times longer over a two-week cycle, what’s the big deal? It becomes a compounding effect. So it needs to be negotiated down.
It’s not a case of just simply saying, ‘All right, take shortcuts,’ because that’s the last message you want to send your people. It becomes more a process: ‘Look, we really can’t delay. There are market opportunity factors. There are cost factors. There’s a host of factors, which you’ve identified as valid; now we need to negotiate around it. What are our alternatives?’
Keep it simple. The general philosophy here is pretty straightforward: This is all about moving the money from their side of the table to my side of the table. It fundamentally becomes that simple. That’s all it is that we are here to do, and in order to do that, certain things need to be present: I need to deliver value. It needs to be commensurate with the price being charged; it needs to be delivered in a timeline that makes it of value to the consumer, etc.
When you’ve got these types of challenges, it just helps if you keep things that foundationally simple, and it also avoids making it personal. It’s not a case, ‘Well, development screwed up; they’re running four weeks behind.’ It becomes more a case where you’re sitting down with development going, ‘Look guys, these are the timelines associated. This is the overall result set that we’re looking for. If there’s an impact here, it permeates through the rest of the cycle. We’ve got to negotiate through this. How do we work around this? How do we still deliver what I need when I need it so that we can get out of it what we expected to that got us into it to begin with?’
People, I find, respond very well under that structure. Maybe your ideal state is 50 and maybe what you’re being told is possible is 30. When dealt with collaboratively, when everybody understands the necessity, you wind up at 40. At the end of the day, there’s a lot of capacity based on drive and commitment.
Schedule sanity checkpoints. The checkpoints represent concerns that are flushed out. Maybe the concern is around delivery timelines. Maybe the concern is around market adoption rate. You match your checkpoints to the concerns. The most wonderful type of concern is a concern born over nothing more than delivery capability and the cost-associated because those are the most controllable — they’re internal only. The concerns that represent a more challenging domain are concerns that deal with market adoption rates, trends, external factors.
(Checkpoints should be) deliberate, because otherwise things will develop a life cycle of their own. That’s when you can really get into trouble. It’s good for something to live and to breathe and to generate its own momentum, but you want to do it in a managed, controlled way. You always want to have at least some sanity checkpoints, otherwise you just lose perspective.
It’s like that old story we learned as kids in science class. You drop the frog in boiling water; well, the frog immediately jumps out and is just fine. But put the frog into lukewarm water and bring it to a slow boil; he’s cooked before he ever jumped out. That’s what you’ve got to avoid. You just get caught up in something, it’s taken on a life of its own, and before you know it, you’ve been boiled.
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