I was reminded just the other day of the importance of intentionality when it comes to carving out time for strategic thinking. Looking back, I haven’t done a very good job adhering to this principle … at least as it applies to this blog. Sigh, where does the time go … my last post going all the way back to May! Makes me think of lyrics to a song (bonus points for anyone who can guess where it is from).

It’s astounding
Time is fleeting
Madness takes its toll
But listen closely
Not for very much longer
I’ve got to keep control

Given we are still somewhat early in the new year, it is appropriate to be thinking about New Year’s Resolutions. Time to take control of our lives again; time to make changes to better ourselves; time to stop the madness. But at the same time, it isn’t always easy to make the changes and move forward without addressing some of the baggage we all carry. 

As this is true with our personal lives, so it is true with technology and Product Management. Curious?

According to several sources, when surveyed entering the New Year the top resolutions people tend to gravitate towards include topics like exercise, dieting, finances, reducing stress levels, spending more time with family, etc. But from personal experience, there is always some level of baggage from decisions we’ve made in the past which make it difficult to remain focused on (or achieve) the said goals we claimed were so important to us. 

Don’t worry, the intent of this post isn’t to focus on how well any of us did or didn’t do relative to New Year’s resolutions … but I do want to draw the analogy to how it applies to our roles as Product Management leaders. Consider this quote from a post titled The Broken Windows Theory of Technical Debt 

Doing things the quick and dirty way sets us up with a technical debt, which is similar to a financial debt. Like a financial debt, the technical debt incurs interest payments, which come in the form of the extra effort that we have to do in future development because of the quick and dirty design choice.

Can you see the correlation? New Year’s resolution is to do better with finances … save more, spend less, etc. Baggage is the mountain of debt accumulated because of poor decision making in the past making it difficult to save. New Year organization goals are to innovate more and drive new revenue. Baggage is the necessity to address technical debt (to retain clients, for security/compliance purposes, etc) making it difficult to innovate.

Here’s the reality … we think we can make up for the technical debt after the stress of this particular project is done … but the next priority project is just around the corner, and chances are it is just as important as the previous one. But as the technical debt continues to grow, executing against the next priority project gets harder and harder. I tend to be a pretty visual person, and this comic sums it up best!

Let me also share how this played out with a poignant example from my past that still haunts/frustrates me today. In one of my roles, I worked for a company who at the time was arguably the leader in the space we served. In fact, this company pioneered technology in the early to mid-90s to set the industry standard because it:

• defined the user experience
• created value to multiple parties in the value chain
• created a network effect which caused it to grow exponentially

As time went on, the company expanded into several adjacencies within the space (through acquisition as well as new development) to further cement their position. Eventually with an established leadership presence and dominant market share, the focus for the organization became more about sustaining technologies than innovation (for more on this topic … check this post out … I highly recommend reading Innovator’s Dilemma!). Single code bases were proliferated to become many with the goal of sustaining the needs of the largest existing clients (or win new large clients). And as this strategy played out, R&D went less and less towards building new features and more and more towards maintenance, stability, quality, compliance, security, and everything related to customer retention across multiple redundant platforms/code bases.

But just like in the Innovator’s Dilemma book with the Bethlehem Steel example, the strategy of sustaining high-margin customers through stability and quality worked well for many years, but the lack of innovation eventually caught up with us. 

Mind you, we were the recognized industry leader at the time when some new, disruptive ideas and technologies were hitting the marketplace. We were approached by all of the Tech Giants … Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft because of our market position. And although I developed the vision on how we could succeed with these Tech Giants and pushed hard for a roadmap to enable us to continue in a dominant market position, the mountain of tech debt was significant enough we simply could not dedicate the resources or move fast enough. Opportunity lost because of the baggage.

So, to finish where we started …

It’s astounding … In our roles as Product Management leaders, we will continually be called upon to astound the organization with new ideas/innovation
Time is fleeting … But be sure to carve out time to deal with the baggage, because over time it will catch up with you
Madness takes its toll … And if you don’t address it, it will drive you mad
But listen closely … Not for very much longer … I’ve got to keep control … As a Product Management leader, don’t allow the behavior to continue … take control

And for those of you who haven’t guessed … the lyrics come from Time Warp from the Rocky Horror Picture Show.