Is Finishing What You Start The Best Choice?

It is not enough for delivering product value.

I spent too long writing this post.

I had an idea for it on my run. When I got home, I started my workflow. I plodded step-by-step. First, I outlined my post objectives. Crafting a catchy title was next. Then, I mind-mapped the flow. I was in a groove.

But at about two hours in, I noticed something. I had decided to reference a prior post of mine to back up my message. Upon opening the prior post, I noticed it had similar points to my new post. To be honest, it was more like a copy. Sure, the flow was different. But the point was the same. Given this new insight, I felt I needed to start over with a different angle.

Then, a funny thing happened. My initial reaction was one of denial. I tried to talk myself into writing the post idea anyway. After all, to communicate a message, as the saying goes, “You sometimes have to say it twelve times in twelve different ways.” I had spent most of my morning thinking and writing. And I did not want this time to go to waste.

My father’s voice was in the back of my mind, telling me to finish what I started. I remembered my tennis coach in high-school saying nobody likes a quitter.

In my profession, I am an Agile coach. So I had my internal coaching voice chiming in as well. The Agile principles in my head were saying I needed a working product before I could say I am “done.” Lean thinking was telling me undone work creates clutter and waste in the system.

All told, I spent another two hours trying to make my original idea work before abandoning it.

I was stuck in the trap of building the “thing right” without keeping my mind focused on building the “right thing.” Giving up was not an option. I did not want to fail. The time I had invested was too much for me to give up now.

I could not help but compare my reaction to my learning moment to those of the product teams I coach. It was surreal. And it solidified in my mind how in-grained these output behaviors have become in us.

The Blinding Force of an Output Focus

When we focus on output, it can undermine our success. Scope, time, and budget become the focus. Quality is compromised and value is secondary. This sounds crazy when we look at it from the outside. And indeed it is.

When we get stuck in this rut, we can’t see our plight. We become obsessed with optimizing our output. We strive to get better at predicting. And we aim to deliver what we imagine or promise. We do so with an uncompromising focus on timeliness.

Does this sound familiar? It rings true for me. Why do we hold onto output like it is our destiny to do so? As I write this, I have reflected on four primary reasons.

1–Bias Emboldens Us

We all have ideas to solve problems. When it comes to product development, the fact is most of our product ideas don’t work. According to the Chaos Report by the Standish Group, 65% of the features we produce are rarely or never used ¹.

When you hear this figure, I suspect you consider it to be a large, almost unbelievable number. I bet you also think, “Yeah, that might be what others experience, but my features and ideas are great.”

This is bias at work. And it can blind us to deliver everything we can imagine to deliver. We move forward without validating the merit of our ideas. We fail to understand if they will indeed solve customer and stakeholder needs.

2–Nature and Nurture Are at Play

It is a natural instinct to want to be right. Predicting and being right was a matter of life and death early in our evolution. This has stuck with us.

When we were in school, we had assignments to do. We did our homework. And we got penalized when we turned it in late or did it wrong. We had to be on time with high quality.

Now as we are in the workforce, the pattern continues. The drumbeat of scope, schedule, budget, and quality goes on. We march steadily to this beat.

Our instinct and lifelong nurturing focus us on output. Getting things done becomes our unwavering focus.

3–Sunk Costs Hold Us Back

Once we have spent time, effort, and money on something, it is difficult to leave it behind. This causes us to hold on too long to our choices even if they are wrong².

This is one of the biggest reasons it is difficult for us to pivot. We find it hard to change directions when we have an insight that negates our prior actions and beliefs. It is not easy to let go of our past efforts. It is as if we have invested too much in a losing stock. And we keep hoping it will turn around.

4–We Want to Keep Our Promises

When we tell someone we will do something, we don’t want to fail. We want to deliver what we promised. This could be a promise to a customer, to our boss, to a family member, or to ourselves.

The pull to fulfill an obligation we made can blind us to deliver what we promised instead of pivoting to a better solution. The promise becomes a contract. And contracts add rigidity.

The Beauty of Embracing Learning to Achieve Outcomes

My repeat blog experience reminded me of a crucial truth. Delivering value depends on rapid learning and the ability to let go of bad decisions fast. We strengthen our ability to pivot by partnering rather than promising. Let’s explore this in the three guidelines that follow.

1Learn Fast. We have a bias for our own ideas. Our natural tendency is to deliver to our promise and to our plan. And we hesitate to abandon our ideas the more we invest in them.

To counteract these truths, we need to test our ideas to assesses their merit. And we need to spend as little effort as possible to learn if our ideas hold water. If we can speed up our ability to build, measure, and learn, we can beat our bias and reduce sunk costs.

Three pillars uphold every implementation of empirical process control: transparency, inspection, and adaptation.

—The Scrum Guide

If we learn fast, we can deliver a better solution for our customers’ needs. This will break us free of our tendency to march toward our original plan.

In product development, this is best achieved with lo-fidelity tests. These inexpensive tests help you learn fast if your ideas are right. And they bring insights before you commit to building complete, enterprise-scalable working software.

To focus on learning fast, don’t over-design and over-plan up-front when knowledge is lowest. Instead, allow learning to guide your path through small, inexpensive experiments. This allows your “right product” to emerge.

2Realize the Past Is the Past. Sunk costs are history. It is time, money, and effort already spent. If you spend it on the wrong thing, the faster you can abandon that path the better.

This is not an easy thing to do as proven by my first attempt at this post. But the less time and effort you invest, the better. Learning fast with minimal investment will help you leave behind bad decisions.

For product development, this mentality is critical. Imagine you spent several months or years designing and planning before building anything. How likely are you to abandon your investment when learning knocks at your door? And believe me, it will come knocking.

Instead, favor trying and testing an idea with minimal planning and effort. You will find it easy to pivot when the idea does not work.

3Partner With Your Customers. Breaking a promise made with bad information is better than delivering on it. Even if we believe our solutions are right, we must test our ideas.

With whom do we test our ideas? We test them with our customers and our stakeholders. This requires that we engage with them often to inform the path taken.

Through close partnering, we understand their perspective and their plight. This allows us to take a walk in their shoes. As a result, we can better understand our customer and stakeholder needs and how best to solve them.

To do this, we have to engage before, during, and after delivery with our product community. This forms a partnership and beats a promise any day.

We are wired to deliver on our promises and finish what we start. This is often at the expense of delivering something valuable. We struggle to see past our biases, act outside our natural and nurtured behaviors, leave sunk costs behind, and break a faulty promise we make upfront. This can make us immune to learning and pivoting when our initial approach proves wrong.

But we can fight these tendencies. We can learn fast, accept the past as the past, and partner with our customers and stakeholders. This allows us to break free of the behaviors that cause us to focus on output instead of outcomes.

Finishing what we start is important. We often ignore the adage to “stop starting and start finishing,” ending up with piles of unfinished work.

But starting the right thing is more important. Embrace learning. Partner with your product community today. And arrive at a better outcome. Find your “right product,” and then, build your “product right.”

Also published in Serious Scrum on Medium.

You can read posts related to this one below:

References

The Standish Group Chaos Report, Standish Group ↩
The Psychology of Sunk Costs. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Arkes, H. R., & Blumer, C. (1985) 35(1):124–140 ↩

Coach Lankford

Todd Lankford unlocks Lean Leverage in organizations to cultivate powerful, engaged product teams who maximize outcomes and impact.

His articles share his experiences and learnings along the way. Join the mailing list to get them in your inbox.

Blogs