The Wages of Sin is Death in Product

“There is no sin unless through a man's own will, and hence the reward when we do right things also of our own will." - St. Augustine of Hippo, The Manichean Debate: The Works of Saint Augustine

In stable, well-understood environments, it is often best to organize work and teams in ways that leverage the efficiency that comes with repetition and deep specialization. For example, in a modern factory manufacturing PPE like masks and gloves, well-defined tasks are specified, and the work proceeds serially, moving from one carefully constructed and defined set of activities to the next. There is little need for collaboration in these settings, and the organizational structure that surrounds stable and repeatable work tends to be hierarchical to ensure that everybody follows the prescribed work process design as efficiently as possible.

However, there is a biblical verse I'm reminded of (Romans 6:23) that states that "the wages of sin is death." The wages of this same efficiency mindset so appropriate for manufacturing PPE, is the death of adaptability and ultimately the death of the firm in complex, emergent, competitive landscapes. Due to the high degree of routinization and formalization, mechanistic process designs exemplified by project timeliness and Gantt Charts are difficult to change in response to new information. Though efficient, a mechanistic design is not agile – it cannot inspect and adapt at requisite speed of software to be competitive. This focus on task efficiency is still embedded as an underlying assumption governing the management of today’s systems, even when it’s not coherent with the nature of the work or shape of customer demand as identified in the customer journey map.

 “We value task accomplishment over relationship building and either are not aware of this cultural bias or, worse, don’t care and don’t want to be bothered with it.” ― Edgar Schein

When, however, the environment is far from equilibrium and uncertain, discrete tasks are harder to define, and therefore organizations cannot rely on a sequence of clearly defined steps. For example, product development teams often face challenges for which there is a little precedent - exploring the unknown-known, or complex domain, using the Cynefin framework. In unpredictable or turbulent environments like new product or service design, organizations must bias more towards collaboration, conversation, experimentation, small cycles through Deming’s Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle to identify positive patterns of response from customers and less on routinization and codified best practices. It may be easier or faster or more efficient to 'go it alone' if we're optimizing for writing that creative brief or feature requirement as quickly and efficiently as possible. When product managers and product owners are focused on exploration, their sin is willfully choosing efficiency (go it alone, get feedback later, right shift risk) over collaboration. The wages of sin is death.

 Developing a breakthrough product or service usually can’t be organized like a factory assembly line. Marketing or user experience experts may develop an initial hypothesis of a market opportunity for a customer segment, which is then turned into a series of tested prototypes with the team of designers, researchers, engineers, and testers, but the actual requirements often (should) evolve through multiple iterations as the team consumes uncertainty (Claude Shannon said that "information is the resolution of uncertainty,") and figures out what is actually feasible, valuable, desirable and for which a stable business model for exploitation might be tenable. This is the inherent nature of an adaptive, learning system.

Consequently, effective product development processes often require ongoing real-time collaboration, rather than rote adherence to a set of sequentially organized, linear actions optimized for efficiency (output over resource cost). The wages of sin is death. The wages of an efficiency mindset in the creation of new products or knowledge-work to create or exploit emergent opportunities leads inevitably to the death of the firm.