I have sometimes wondered what it would be like to plug into the Matrix, where you can download knowledge and experience other realities and people.

This would be a huge dystopian power for good: The playing field of knowledge is completely leveled. Zero barrier to entry. Anyone and everyone can learn anything. Then, with any motivation at all, could embark on a journey to do that thing, build that thing, create that thing, whatever they want.

The other benefit would be the ability to know how others truly feel. We can plug into personalities and different bodies and experiences. I said dystopian, right? Powerful, but frightening if you let your mind wander to the darker realm of possibilities.

I don’t know anything in this world outside my own experience, interaction, and perception of how things transpired. I know not the future, only 1 perspective of the past. I once heard Eric Weinstein say that: “Our past is never actual reality. It is only our perception from one view point. Everyone else that was there experienced something completely different than you. Your past is merely a perspective.”

If we take these words to heart, then the job of product development is to feed a shared perception of value and a shared perspective of value.

{Given} that everyone’s perspective and perception of anything is completely relative, {Then} the job of product development is to find the shared-values of the market.

We assume to know the ‘needs of the market’ until we collect real data.

‘Real data’ is two things (simplified):

1. outcome based metrics
2. executing on hypotheses based on metrics

Scrum with Agile creates these tight feedback loops. The faster you build, the faster you garner data, the faster you can execute with more information.

Finding the shared values in the market should be the deeper focus, not on just features and functions. The deeper human values are the real reason people stick to an app, even if it’s just merely entrenchment and convenience that they don’t switch to a competitor. That’s human enough.

Life is agile. We learn by doing. Nobody could have calculated how ‘it’ turned out anyway, really. We need to remember this same lesson for product development:

1. We desire data quickly. Best way to get data is through feedback.
2. To get feedback we must build something.
3. To get feedback quickly we must build it quickly.
4. To build quickly we must break down work.
5. To break down work we need people to work together to break it down.
6. For people to work together frequently we must establish engagement patterns and have operational systems that allow for speed of engagement.
7. Speed of engagement allows speed of build.
8. Speed of building allows for quicker feedback loops.

This essentially is Agile.

Find every way you can to break down work, increase feedback loops, and gather data. These principles should drive us to questioning our current narrative, our current processes, and our old behaviors. Can we do it better?

This also works in life. Forced change = new feedback.

Coming Out of the Unknown

With all of our capital deployed from our venture fund out, we’ve found a couple of winning investments. One of these investments we’ve made has touched my heartstrings, and I decided back in January to increase my engagement from merely an ‘investor’ to a Co-Founder (I told you in my last post it was merely a matter of time I put keyboard to code)!

Over the last 9 months we have been doing the Product Development framework with a close community of users. The feedback and iterative improvement on our application has been astounding and we’re about ready to launch our ‘production-ready’ MVP.

While helping clients use Agile and Scrum is always a joy, putting your money where your mouth is on your (own) projects makes it even more real.

I’m excited to announce what we’ve been grinding on for better part of 2023.

Inspect. Adapt. Build and learn. I’m executing. Are you?

All the best,
ps

For those who want to listen to me read this post. 🙂