Ready, Fire, Fire, Fire, Aim, Fire, Fire, Aim, Fire… - Squadron Weekly Email
Originally posted 28th November 2022
For your product and your team, certainty and over-preparation are the enemy: aim to run before you walk, to fail in public, and to correct mistakes rather than avoid them.
My client was worried that they were months from launching a customised clothing line with a major new customer, and nothing connected to anything else. The website, the database, the customer’s factory were all hopelessly incompatible, it seemed, and there was no clear way to get them working together, certainly not by the onrushing deadline. So of course the first thing I had them do was fail to make just one red T-shirt–but narrowing the field so radically and focussing on what didn’t work meant we could see what to fix first, and pretty soon we had an actual jersey to display. Customisations, styles, and packaging followed, and the product shocked everyone by being ready on time. The team ran plenty of experiments with negative results (they still have the three-legged trousers proudly hanging on the wall, I think) but making many such mistakes quickly and loudly forced them to iterate and correct. What could you fail on today?
This first appeared in my weekly Squirrel Squadron email, which goes out every Monday, and was originally posted on 28th November 2022. To get my provocative thoughts and tips direct to your inbox first, sign up here: https://squirrelsquadron.com