How I Learned Outcomes Don’t Come From a Breakthrough First Effort

Here’s how I fell in love with the chase.

It was almost midnight. The night was young.

My team and I still had several hours before launch the next morning. We had poured our hearts into this release.

This was one of the best teams I had ever worked with, staffed to the gills with awe-inspiring talent. We had made all the right moves to delight our customers.

• High team collaboration to harness our collective might
• Iterative experiments to evolve exactly what users needed
• An intense focus on finishing one thing before starting another
• Close customer engagement before, during, and after development

I was not up working.

Rather, I couldn’t sleep from the anticipation. We had a smooth finish the day before, like any other day for the past four months of this release. As I said, it was a great team.

We were developing a modern, in-store experience for a large retailer. And our preparation was exquisite. I don’t think I had ever been as prepared as this for anything.

We launched the next morning in one retail location. Three months later, they removed the digital experience we created. It failed to take off with customers. Nobody expected this. Our high expectations fell to the floor.

And just like that, I learned a crucial lesson.

Effort, perfect execution, and brilliant teams don’t guarantee outcomes.

Everything you do is a practice.

And you have to have a lot of it to reach the outcomes you desire.

Plus patience.

I learned the need for patient practice.

How we get stuck.

Becoming attached to inputs and outputs is actually an epidemic in the product space.

Why?

It’s what we can control. We can dictate our actions and what we produce from them. So, we focus on that.

• We prioritize work as if we know what will get results.
• We trust in opinions and feedback before we get to launch.
• We set deadlines for features, as if we know what users need.
• We build and perfect what we prioritize, falling in love with our effort.

These beliefs turn into a form of blinders, obscuring us from seeing our effort and expertise in the right way. Our output becomes everything. It’s our one big bet.

But here’s the kicker: the users of what we produce aren’t concerned with our effort.

They don’t give credit to us for years of perfecting our craft.

We don’t get a pass because we made all the right moves.

Users care about the usefulness of what you build and how it makes them feel. 

No amount of user research, ideation, experimentation, or iteration beforehand can guarantee that. Until you let your creation loose in the wild, you won’t know if it’s a winner.

You won’t know what works until it does.

How we get unstuck.

It’s actually OK to love what you do. Be proud of what you produce.

Just don’t expect anything from it apart from the joy of the process.

But here’s the problem. We get fixated on the process, our effort, our creation. We start believing, “I’ve got this figured out.”

The one thing my team learned from its big launch is that we didn’t have anything “figured out.” We had our moonshot. And we learned the hard way that moonshots don’t give birth to great products. The impact we got was impact with the moon, not the user success we hoped for.

We have to see our effort for what it is: practice.

Everything great is downstream of practice.

We get better at what we do and how we do it. And then we reach that moment when we hit the mark and our practice pays off. We strike a chord with our intended audience, and they resonate with what we produce.

That’s what we’re after. And it’s completely out of our control. But we can control our deliberate, daily practice to get there.

Great products aren’t born, they’re nurtured through ongoing practice.

How to practice practicing.

Amidst the notion of practice, we must be careful.

We can easily find ourselves perfecting and polishing our creation to a fault.

• Delaying launch to add in one more thing
• Implementing ideas because we like them
• Building extra safeguards for fringe use cases
• Believing too much in our practices and starting to stagnate
• Chasing process with more process in the pursuit of diligence

Practice requires a high frequency of iteration and a retreat from perfection.

Frequency of practice makes sense. Repetition will make you better. You learn as you do.

But a retreat from perfection? Isn’t practice a means of perfecting your craft? Well, yes, and no.

While practice will help you hone and evolve your effort and your output, it won’t ensure your outcome. You can get crazy good at what you produce and still have no customer.

This was what happened to my team. We had perfect teamwork, the perfect process, and perfect output. But our customers were absent and did not show up for our big debut.

The trick is to iterate based on real-world feedback. You have to put your iterations into the wild. This delivers the truth of your effort, the worth of your practice. If my team had done this earlier, we would have learned the reality of our in-store solution sooner.

If you iterate without the truth, you are spinning without progress.

Ideas are practice for a great feature.
Features are practice for a great product.
Collaboration is practice for a great team.

All effort is a practice. And to evaluate output, your customer has to experience it. Don’t fall in love with it prematurely.

Inspect what you do early and often with real-world reaction.

And embrace that truth and learn from it.

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That’s it. I hope my lessons in learning patient practice help you in your pursuit of outcomes.

I learned I can’t rest on my laurels. My best effort is not a sure thing. I never know how my effort will land.

But there is beauty in the journey, in the chase of a great product.

This is a lesson many can use.

It’s an unending learning path to achieve outcomes. It’s a practice. And if you are patient, your practice may eventually get you to perfect.

Good luck out there. And keep up the practice.

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