BLACK SWAN FARMING
BLACK SWAN FARMING

Trade-offs

Love him or hate him, no one can deny that Steve Jobs knew a thing or two about developing products. In “The Lost Interviews” he shared this insight about what makes product development so different:

“As you evolve that great idea, it changes and grows. It never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it.

You also find tremendous trade-offs that you have to make. There are certain things you cannot make electrons do, or plastic or glass or even factories or robots. Designing a product is keeping 5,000 things in your brain – fitting them all together in new and different ways to get what you want. Every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together.”

Steve Jobs, by ANDRÉ CARRILHO

Tremendous trade-offs! Sounds both terrifying and promising. This is where knowing the Cost of Delay really can help, because a lot of those tradeoffs involve changing the value of the product as well as how long it might take to get your product into market.

We talked about this briefly in the Black Swan Farming paper:

Maersk Line saw waste from a cost-centric view – rather than a more holistic approach that takes into account value and urgency. A strong focus on reducing development cost had resulted in sub-optimal trade-offs in decision-making. When we interviewed business stakeholders, they expressed frustration with the focus on cost reduction and the subsequent delay in deliveries.
These were some of the things we heard from business stakeholders:

“…we often save a dime to later spend a dollar”

“…a $2,000 change which took 6 weeks…”

“Saving costs is good but delivering results is better”

If you don’t understand the Cost of Delay, how can you possibly make sensible trade-off decisions?