Making it Up As We Go
Original post from July 8, 2014 on Medium.
Life Lessons in the Valley
Smile and nod and pretend you have ample expertise to do the task ahead of you. We’ve all been there at some point, it’s the classic fake it till you make it mantra and despite causing some moments of panic it usually all works out in the end. Being relatively new to the tech industry, and working life in general, it took me some time to truly embrace this mindset. In school I was used to being handed problems that were accompanied by exactly enough information to arrive at an elegant, optimal solution. In mathematics and computer science classes I found comfort in the notion that every question I was given had an answer and once I figured it out I could be relatively confident in my success.
Working in an office in Silicon Valley, I became disillusioned pretty quickly with the idea that every problem has a solution. I also gave up on the notion that problems handed to me would be well formed or even worth solving. And I definitely stopped believing that anyone actually had anywhere close to enough information to solve problems with confidence. My theory is that pretty much everyone is making it up as they go; some people are just better at pretending they have all the answers.
A New Project
About two months ago I was fortunate enough to be given the chance to work on a small team of entirely early career people at a large tech company. It has been a great experience so far in many ways, but what I find really refreshing is the team’s openness and honesty with each other. We are making up the entire project as we go, but we don’t have to waste time and energy pretending to each other that we know more than we actually do. Since we are all at similar points in our careers we have no issues expressing our opinions and are quick to course correct when the project isn’t progressing as we had hoped.
The team discussing assumptions and open questions for our idea.
We have been given five months to come up with, design and create our own product for the company. With the lack of a well formed problem, or any substantial research in the problem space, we had to quickly decide on what to work on and come up with a “why”. Project teams face challenges like this all the time, but often get bogged down with office politics and the need to convey their idea and reasons for believing in it to a large number of stake holders. Without too much of that overhead in the way we have been able to focus on making things work well for our small team of five people.
Some of the things we have done and learned in the process of making up this project as we go:
- Sharing is caring. Seriously, it is. The team quickly developed a trusting relationship by sharing our goals for the project and our careers. With all this on the table everyone feels much more invested and beholden to the success of the project because it’s explicit what each team member cares about and why. This keeps us all motivated and able to motivate each other.
- Make decisions fast. If two teammates with the same information on a problem disagree on the solution there is probably no real way of knowing what the “better” solution is, if there is one at all. So ditch the pride and flip a coin if necessary. Our team randomly chooses one decision maker (really randomly! We play Tap Roulette) for any decision that needs to be made. Then we have as brief a discussion as possible on it and once the decision is made we move on. Simple, right? But it takes a lot of trust in the team (hence the importance of number 1).
- Building is believing. We have to trust our instincts and intuition to validate why we are doing what we are doing on a daily basis. Since real research takes too long, most of the time all there is to go off of is anecdotes from talking to people or our own gut instincts. It has worked out okay so far, but certainly has the potential to lead us down a rabbit hole. After a decision is made — or perhaps just when writing code — I often hear teammates or myself utter a nervous, but happy “I have no idea if this will work.” And that’s okay!
Team selfie while doing user research at a local community college
I’m not saying what we are doing is the right way to do it, it just happens to work for us. I think every team is different and should discover their own process and product as they go. We will never know enough to be truly confident in our decisions when building products. There are simply too many human factors and by the time any sufficient research has been done the market has completely changed. But I’ve learned to accept that. I’m really proud of what we have accomplished in two short months and I’m looking forward to continuing to improvise our methods throughout the rest of the project.