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Secrecy

I am going to argue that as a group, product development professionals have a bias toward excessive secrecy.

By nature, PD requires some degree of secrecy. It is obviously a poor idea to disclose all the details of your company’s strategy.
Top Secret
Inventors by instinct keep their best ideas under wraps. After all, you are only as good as your last idea. I have had customers with cubicles within yards of one another working on projects with us, but they never share the information with their co-workers. There are also the dark cautionary tales about people who disclosed confidential information through carelessness or negligence.

Simply put — in most organizations you can get in trouble for sharing too much.

Here’s the dilemma: by definition, product development relies on an exchange of ideas. New products do not occur in a vacuum.

Of course, as practitioners we will never be criticized for excessive secrecy, but our organizations will pay the price over time through a failure to innovate.

I have seen very few ideas lost or stolen, but thousands that have failed because of poor execution.

This brings me to another of my favorite aphorisms: “Every time I think I see conspiracy, in the end all I find is ignorance or sloth.”

The Theory and Practice of Good Enough

One of my favorite and often used aphorisms is, “Perfection is the enemy of good.”

Very often the essence of a promising development is obscured by added features or over-refining of an idea.

This concept is usually attributed to Voltaire. Business leaders have nuanced it: Edward de Castro, one of the founders of Data General, said, “Not everything worth doing is worth doing well”.

This philosophy was wonderfully chronicled in Tracy Kidder’s “The Soul of a New Machine”.

The_soul_of_a_new_machine_--_book_cover

Case in point: the concept of the “minimum viable product” practiced thirty five years before the term.

Get the product in front of the customer now!

Rumsfeld Matrix (Part 1)

”Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” — 2002, Donald Rumsfeld.

From this came “The Rumsfeld Matrix”.

Rumsfeld Matrix

Product developers and their managers have always had trouble dealing with uncertainty. The Rumsfeld Matrix illustrates both the “comfort” that comes from working in the lower left quadrant where all is known, as well as the complexity with working in the top right.

You can bet the “fuzzy front end” is not so fuzzy if you live in the bottom left quadrant.

More about the implications of this in future posts.