How Deep Is Your Vision?
September 22, 2007 – 5:09 pmThere’s a terrible thing that happens in companies nowadays. If you think about it, we’re all built to do one thing: put visionary people with endless ideas (leadership) in a room with obsessive planners (that would be us PMs), and then give them an army of managers to direct. This is both a great thing and tragedy waiting to happen.
Wait. Tragedy? How so? Look through your company’s (or better yet, your former company’s) project portfolio. I guarantee you will see at least one, maybe many, projects whose scope is large enough and complex enough, and the roadmap deep enough, that it’s impossible to describe it in a single paragraph. Or drawing. Or even a single meeting.
Why is this bad? Beyond the difficulty of illustrating your vision and gaining adoption (you want adoption, right?), there’s the difficulty of communicating it. Consider this: the typical person’s short term memory is 5-7 items. That means that if you are describing something to them, and there’s more than 5-7 bullet points to it, they will most likely lose part of the message. There’s a great article on Church of the Customer illustrating a great case study of this very thing. If your ideas get too big to remember and comprehend easily, you’re in trouble.
So what am I evangelizing here? Small projects for all? No, not necessarily. What I recommend is finding ways to group your ideas. Most products are actually aimed at one or a few goals. Most of the features that you’re planning are probably designed to contribute to one of those goals. Some of the goals, in fact, probably contribute to bigger goals. That’s the thing. Build a tree of goals. Get hierarchical if you can, but a network diagram works as well. Let people learn your 3-5 things (you want to keep it under their short term memory tolerance, remember, so it’s easy to remember), then branch to what’s under one item, then the next, then the next, then branch deeper… each time, again, relate it to the idea above, then the idea above that. By relating it back, you are also using memory techniques.
We all learned these memory techniques to get through all those boring 100 level college courses, remember? Leverage them! Use them to communicate your vision! Build a picture that is easily memorable and understandable. This will help you spread your vision. It will make your vision easier to understand. It will even make it easier to manage.
No matter how complex, Keep It Simple, Stupid… and they’ll remember and respond, just like you just did ;).
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