Incremental and Iterative – Failures of Perspective©
“Too often we just look at these glistening successes. Behind them in many, many cases is failure along the way and that doesn’t get put into the Wikipedia page or the bio. Yet these failures teach you every bit as the successes” — Admiral (Ret.) Michael Mullen, USN.
What is a guarantee for every product manager is that they plan for success, but are marred by the scars of ‘failures-past’. Shamed by our previous moments of coming up short, we contour over them to enhance and sculpt a perception driven by our insecurities. We overlook the fact that so much of our achievements and successes as being the result of serendipitous experimenting.
Those of us in the industry, we are quite familiar with the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Those unfamiliar, the MVP Model is a software product launch with incomplete capabilities that has yet to achieve its full potential. In the world of Agile, these stages are known as iterations or increments if referring to Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sunderland’s Scrum Guide. Product managers and industry outsiders often use both these terms interchangeably, rightly and also wrongly alike to get their points across.
Ironically, despite their wide usage in our professional lexicon, many of us, myself included, don’t always fully grasp their true essence and purpose. With origins going as far back as the Stoics of the Ancient Roman and Greek periods, their true meaning is located far beyond the corporate trainings and presentations we are given and give.
I chose to quote Michael Mullen above firstly because like him, my father too was a Naval Surface Warfare Officer. Secondly, as a follow on from the first, known failures in their profession historically are ones that makes the history books due to their catastrophic and graphic nature with wide ranging social implications, at least from the side with the greatest loss from the campaign (e.g. Britain in the Gallipoli Naval Campaign or the US at Pearl Harbor). Given how high the stakes are in these circumstances, Michael Mullen’s candour about the role of failure in his career demonstrated to me how powerful failures truly are in shaping who we are and its contribution to our learning curve and of those around us.
My favourite children’s author, C.S. Lewis described failure as “finger posts on the road on the road to achievement” — advice that was paramount in my own school day challenges of reading. Similarly, Thomas Edison put it more wittily, “I have not failed. I’ve found 10,000 ways that won’t work”. And this is why Mullen’s words are so compelling because most of us agree that learning is a compounding activity, but compounded on what exactly? Our successes, yes…our successes do help elevate our learning and are moments that we most like to remember, recount and share with others, making them ‘visible’ data. However, to borrow the thinking of the ancient thinkers, we must comprehend our high points with an empiricist stance and see that it too is the compounded result of our past failures and shortcomings — periods of speculation driven by a sense of absolute certainty only to have the bubble be burst by the forces of an unapologetic reality. Call it what you like, there is something both philosophical and practical about our failures, especially ones where there is a ‘pointed’, very straightforward feedback loop; the type you cannot get from the domesticated environments of modern academia and classrooms. Sadly these bad habits we develop from school sometimes carry on silently as we enter the real world, covering up our failures rather than seeing them as the goldmine of learning they really are.
For those in the technology sector — probably many given the acceleration of digitisation — our failures are one of the most powerful assets with some great useful business cases. A failed feature launch or a failed idea will disclose to us what not to do and by archiving these failures enable our colleagues and friends to be able to access portals of data that our competitors do not have. This in turn helps to improve our product development cycle as well as bring about new idea exploration, and if done controllably (i.e. early and often) saving millions to billions in investment funds and organisation resources.
Taking One Step back for Two Steps Forward
Working in cross-functional Agile teams, aided by the Scrum Guide, my colleagues and I would do Sprint planning based on our workload requirements and how we would ‘deliver’. Our discussions revolved around bouncing new ideas and potential impediments. Whilst discussions generate a sense of progress within the teams, members of our Tribe raised concerns whether we were confusing activity with progress and forgetting to implement feedback loops into our Sprint Planning and review meetings. Even in Scrum daily calls, arguably the team’s most intimate time together, especially as I have only ever worked in teams spanning multiple continents, we would talk of weekly successes initially. It took sometime but our conversations did start to see a shift in content, from just accomplishments to one that incorporated iterative failures with periodic reflections. I personally don’t know about others and thus cannot speak for anyone else, but I have a habit of saving multiple versions of files as I progress along. Taxing for my hard drive sometimes but great for me to document if something did not work, and to seek help on why it did not see through to fruition as planned. Most importantly, it meant we could capitalise on prior failed iterations and ventures as a learning curve right down to the story-point level on our Jira board.
Failing for Success
Our temporary setbacks in the longer term act as our building blocks for the solution we spend a considerable time towards. The Stoics of the ancient knew this, which made them far ahead of their time and unsurprising inspiration behind many of the well-known progresses of human history. For example, the story of the Wright brothers is a well-known story of iterative failure and progress. Drawing on the works of da Vinci, Lilienthal and others, the two brothers pursued a strategy of control where they would first learn to glide to master the art of control before attempting motor-driven flight. They knew this entire initial phase of work would all lead to failure in actually staying off the ground. Putting it in the perspective of product management, imagine if funds and resources were put into diving into the engine and road mapping for a successful take-off flight. And now imagine this gargantuan metal bird crashing into the ground, engulfed by the flames of the pilot and fuel.
Probably something (simplified) like this:
Project Manager: Welcome everyone to our very first flight launch
[Clapping crowd]
Pilot [from the cockpit]: Ready for take-off
[Plane takes off…spinning rotary blades]
[…Plane flies…flies…and CRASHES!!]
[…]
Project Manager: How could this happen? We had a plan and everything?
[…Ambulance and Fire Brigade rush to the crash site]
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By putting failure into their journey, and taking it as their “finger posts”, they not only were able to mitigate risk in stages, each increment helping resolve a major challenge, the end product was that much more resilient to the stresses of flight being subjected to it.
Failing to See Perspective
Marcus Aurelius mentioned ‘The Universe is Change; Life is Opinion (Meditations IV:3). His rather indifference approach to life’s calamities serves to give us 2 powerful teachings in the world of product management.
- Life after Failure and Death: Return to past failures and reflect on what went wrong and seek the help of others if necessary to understand the results.
- Failure after Success — failure strikes back: Not learning from failings of our past makes success that much more fragile and less impactful, forcing us to guess, potentially compounding errors of future judgment.
If we choose to sulk over plans not going our way, then we start to hide our low points, we blemish over them and over zealously only highlight and recount the high points instead. Suppressing such memories will make you internally incomplete with an external guise of completion (i.e. fragile) and make extracting lessons from experience ever more difficult for future endeavours, especially if structurally similar to ones we encountered in the past. But lets not be so cynical as Keynes pointed out, “in the long run we’re all dead!” so lets take each problem as it comes and plan to accept failure as a regular occurrence to be experienced and cherished rather than shunned away and locked up.
Summary
- Failure is not a set back but an opportunity to learn and seek guidance from your own actions.
- Failure is a social good just as much it is an individual asset.
- Be serendipitous whilst still adhering to a plan.
- Don’t just accept failure, but expect it. If you are always surprised by the existence of a failure then your errors will have bigger future errors.
- Leave room for Failure as it too is within the Natural Laws of the Universe.
