The Leaflet #135: when to avoid MVPs, squishy domains, a central contradiction leaders screw up
When is shipping an MVP the wrong move?
Many a Leaflet has extolled the virtues of shipping fast and acting timely on feedback. (See, eg, demos over memos). This approach assumes failure is cheap. If your rough version flops, it’s no big deal. You didn’t spend a ton of time or cash to make it. You learn and you try again with a whole new version or a variation on the original flop.
But there are cases when failure isn’t cheap. It’s worth knowing those cases so you can avoid them and also reassure risk-averse teammates (or board members) that you’re not a total MVP-at-all-costs dogmatist.
Cases where you shouldn’t ship first and ask questions later:
Safety-critical work, where a failure hurts someone relying on you. You don’t ship a minimum viable version of the thing keeping a patient alive, or the structural element of a K-12 school, or the protocol that protects a vulnerable person.
Trust-critical work. Some kinds of trust can’t be recovered if a first experience isn’t excellent. MVP-based iteration assumes you’ll have multiple rounds of feedback, an ongoing conversation, give and take. Sometimes you don’t have the history or status with a partner that enable those.
Legally-bound work, where missing features or blurry edges mean you’re breaking a rule, mishandling someone’s data, or violating their rights.
In these cases, the cost of an early failure dwarfs the cost of building carefully the first time, so an “expensive” polished version is actually cheaper. Put another way: the standard of viability of products in these domains is too high for you to offer the minimum.
-ben and eric
How should you manage work in a domain that’s hard to quantify?
Comms, relationship-building, the political and policy parts of the work: these domains can seem “scorecard-proof” because they’re hard to quantify. Whether you’re a subject matter expert in these domains or not, you’ve probably been assigned a metric or goal that feels fake because it pastes a numerical target on something.
You, good leader, want to avoid that fakery. You, good leader, also want to avoid getting hoodwinked by supposed experts who hand-wave at goals.
Here’s one way to achieve both of those. The outcomes in these domains are often noisy, hard to pin to deadlines, and driven by handfuls of exogenous factors. It is hard to quantify whether a relationship “worked” or whether the policy environment improved.
One way to deal with this is to track and score the observable behaviors that reliably produce the good outcomes you want.
Every domain has practitioners who are obviously good at it. Watch what they actually do. Look for the repeatable, observable actions. The great relationship-builder, eg, follows up within a day, remembers the personal detail, never lets a thank you note languish in drafts. The great comms operator publishes regularly, tailors the message to the audience’s values, avoids jargon.
So instead of a fake outcome goal, you hold the person accountable to a real input goal. The inputs are behaviors that, in your best judgment (or industry best practice, if you have to have a proxy), cause the outcome.
If you’ve chosen the behaviors well, you can avoid a Goodharting pickle, where people nail a metric without actually delivering what you need. Behavioral standards are a description of doing the work well, instead of a stat that can be juked while doing it badly.
-ben
A central contradiction of strong leadership
You are responsible for the whole mission, and your job is to get it done by making the people around you better, not by being better than them.
New leaders often get this backwards. They rise because they were excellent at the work, so as leaders they keep doing the work, or they hover around and hand the answers to the people who replaced them. Both of those moves can feel generous while making the team less capable. Over time, solving your reports’ problems for them makes you the bottleneck for ~everything in the organization.
Instead of this, think of yourself as a teacher. We’ve written here before that a great teacher pulls off a particular alchemy: they convince the student the responsibility is 100% the student’s, while the teacher in fact retains 100% of the responsibility for the student’s success. You don’t let any goals drop. You place people between you and the mission and spend your energy making them capable of handling their piece of it. You do this by setting clear goals for them and meeting every legitimate need they have to hit those goals.
A small set of habits bring this to life.
When a report brings you a problem, ask how they’d solve it without you first.
When they nail something on their own, even something incremental and small, name it, so they know to do more of it.
Picture yourself as a helium balloon whose natural place is the ceiling, where you can see the whole room. You come down on a string when you must, but whatever you do down there has to build capacity in others, so you can return to the panoramic view only you can hold.
When you’re doing this reasonably well, your best people need you less every month, your one-on-ones get shorter and more strategic, and you get closer to achieving your mission through other people’s efforts. By contrast, when you’re screwing this up, you’re indispensable, somewhere between quite tired and exhausted, and bear both of those status as badges of honor.
Own the outcome completely. Give the work away completely. Living into that apparent contradiction can carry you a long way.
-ben
COMPELLING QUOTATIONS
Marketing maven Seth Godin on selling:
Selling is simply a dance with possibility and empathy. It requires you to see the audience you’ve chosen to serve, then to bring them what they need. They might not realize it yet, but once you engage with them, either you’ll learn what’s not working in your craft or they’ll learn that you’ve created something that they’ve been waiting for, something that is filled with magic.
Novelist John Steinbeck on biblical translations (in East of Eden):
The American Standard translation orders men to triumph over sin, and you can call sin ignorance. The King James translation makes a promise in ‘Thou shalt,’ meaning that men will surely triumph over sin. But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’—that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.’ Don’t you see?
Memoirist Helen MacDonald on wildness:
Elusive, spectacular, utterly at home, the fact of these British goshawks makes me happy. Their existence gives the lie to the thought that the wild is always something untouched by human hearts and hands. The wild can be human work.