Product Management Engineering Excellence Leadership

The Importance of Evaluating Direction: Are You Heading the Right Way?

Published on 20 January 2024

Written by Martin Hinshelwood

5 minute read

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As Lao Tzu wisely said, “If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.” This quote resonates deeply with me, both as a professional Scrum trainer and a practitioner. Whether you’re a developer writing code or an organization strategizing for the future, it’s vital to continuously ask yourself: Are we heading in the right direction? 🛤️

In this post, we’ll explore why it’s crucial to evaluate your direction regularly at different levels—individual, team, and organizational—and how you can pivot when necessary to achieve better outcomes.

Hitting the Target as a Developer 🎯

At the developer level, the idea of assessing direction is highly applicable. When you’re deep into coding, it’s easy to focus on just delivering features and forget to evaluate whether you’re making the right choices along the way. Here are some key questions you should ask:

Am I writing the right code?
Is this the right approach for this feature?
Are there better architectural or security decisions I could be making?

One personal experience I often share is when a team I was working with delivered a product that, while feature-rich, was riddled with security flaws. Despite excellent feature development, the oversight in security direction led to customer dissatisfaction and extra work post-launch. This is why we must constantly reevaluate our progress. The worst case? You could end up delivering a product with functionality, but it’s insecure, buggy, or unusable for your target audience. 😱

Key Takeaways for Developers:

Regularly check if your code aligns with the product vision.
Ensure that architectural and security choices are sound.
Don’t wait until the end of the product cycle to assess usability and security issues—fix them along the way.

Product Owners: Are You Building the Right Features? 🚀

The same principle applies to product owners. It’s easy to get tunnel vision, especially when you’re committed to delivering certain features. But the real question is: Are you building the right features that truly benefit your users?

I remember working with a product owner who was keen on adding more features to a product. The team built these out with speed and efficiency, but the customers weren’t interested in using them. The product was feature-packed, yet didn’t solve the key pain points of its users. Had we stopped to evaluate direction, we would have realized this much sooner.

Product Owner’s Evaluation Checklist:

Does this feature align with customer needs?
Is this the right time to introduce this feature, or could resources be better spent elsewhere?
What feedback are we receiving, and are we truly listening?

💡 Pro tip: Constantly monitor market trends and feedback. Don’t assume the path you’re on is the right one just because it worked in the past. Products and users evolve, and so should your direction!

The Organizational Level: Avoiding the Cliff 🏢🕳️

On a larger scale, entire organizations sometimes fail to course-correct. They are so set on their established strategy that they overlook the shifts in market dynamics, customer needs, or even technological advancements. This stubbornness often leads them off a cliff. 📉

A memorable example comes from a company I worked with that built an AI assistant for booking meetings. It was a brilliant idea: the bot could schedule meetings for you through chat platforms like Teams. However, after analyzing user behavior, they realized most customers preferred booking meetings directly on the website. The chatbot feature, once seen as innovative, was barely used. Instead of doubling down on the chatbot, the company pivoted its strategy, rebranding itself and realigning the product with actual customer behaviors.

Lessons for Organizations:

Don’t fear change. Sometimes, your best-laid plans might not align with reality, and that’s okay!
Gather and analyze data to understand how users are interacting with your product.
Be adaptable. If the data suggests a change in direction, embrace it.

Case Study: The High Jumper Who Changed the Game

If you’re looking for a historical example of direction change, the story of Dick Fosbury, the Olympic high jumper, is a perfect analogy. In the 1960s, high jumpers would leap over the bar with one leg leading. But Fosbury introduced the Fosbury Flop, a revolutionary technique where the athlete jumps backwards over the bar. He won gold medals and broke records using this method, yet it took 10 years before others adopted it! 🤯

Why? Because people were comfortable with the old way, even if it wasn’t the best way. This highlights an important lesson: doing things the same way for the sake of comfort can prevent innovation and success. Don’t wait 10 years to change direction when a better way is clearly visible.

Pivoting: Knowing When It’s Time to Change ⏳🔄

So how do you know when it’s time to pivot?

Listen to feedback. Whether it’s from your customers, team members, or the market, feedback is invaluable. If the data is telling you something, don’t ignore it.
Regular retrospectives. Scrum offers us the chance to reflect and adapt at regular intervals. Make sure your team is not just going through the motions but is genuinely evaluating the direction.
Embrace flexibility. Being too rigid in your strategy could lead to failure. Sometimes small pivots, like the AI assistant example, can make all the difference.

Practical Tips for Agile Teams:

Schedule frequent retrospectives to evaluate direction.
Don’t be afraid to abandon a feature or project that isn’t working.
Foster a culture where feedback is embraced, not feared.

Final Thoughts: Direction Determines Destination 🧭

Whether you’re a developer, a product owner, or leading an organization, one truth remains: Direction determines destination. If you don’t assess where you’re heading, you could end up in a place you don’t want to be.

To recap:

Developers: Always ensure your code aligns with the overall vision and product goals.
Product Owners: Build features that add real value, not just more complexity.
Organizations: Stay flexible and open to change; otherwise, you risk driving off the cliff.

It’s crucial to take a step back, evaluate, and be willing to adjust your course. As Lao Tzu suggests, if you don’t change direction, you may end up somewhere you don’t want to be. And nobody wants that, right? 🚫

So there’s a quote from Lau which is, “If you do not change direction, you may end up where you’re heading.” And I think that’s absolutely a thing we have to be concerned with. We want to be continuously asking ourselves, are we going in the right direction? And that can be asked at many levels, right? I can be a developer building a product, and I’m writing code. Am I writing the right code? Am I taking this product in the right direction? Am I making the right architectural choices? Am I making the right security choices? Right? Because you don’t want to head in that direction where you end up at the end of a product cycle, you’re shipping your product to a bunch of users, and there’s security flaws, and there’s usability issues, and there’s… because we’ve not been heading in the right direction.

And that’s also true at the product owner level, right? Are we building the right features in our product? Are we going in the right direction to maximise our ability to provide benefit in the market and thus have lots of people use our product? And it also works at the organisational level. Are we as a business focused on the right vision? Are we going in the right direction? And quite often, lots of organisations head off the cliff and don’t change direction, right? They forget to look at the data. They forget that the world is ever-changing and ever-dynamic, and that where you thought you were going might not be the right place for you.

There’s a great example. It’s a product I use. It used to be called Zoom, nothing to do with the video conferencing tool, but it allowed you… it was basically an AI assistant that would help you with booking your meetings. So you could add them on Teams, you could add them on whatever chat platforms you’ve got, and I could just message it and say, “Set me up a meeting with Satia at 3:00 on Thursday,” right? And it would go off and it would email Satia and say, “We’ve got this meeting to set up. How would you like it to be? You want to pick your valid options?” And it would figure out from everybody’s valid options what’s a good time to host that meeting, and then it would just book it, right? It would book it straight into your calendar.

But they realised that that’s not how people use their product. Most people that used their product just went to the website and booked through the website, right? They literally went, “New meeting, here’s who I want to attend, submit,” and that would go off and do it. So they weren’t going through the chatbot, so the chatbot was largely irrelevant to their business outcome. The thing that they were delivering that people were using was largely irrelevant. So they actually changed their whole business strategy in order to fit how people were using their product, right? They were taking advantage of an opportunity that arose. Instead of heading in the direction that they were heading, they pivoted. Maybe not far, right? But they pivoted over to a different direction, and they actually renamed their entire organisation. They reasserted all of their interfaces and stuff around this. This is the paradigm that people are actually using in our product.

And that’s something that lots of organisations don’t do. What’s a good example of things not happening that way? Oh, I’m not going to remember the dude’s name, but the dude that was doing the high jump. Everybody at the time was doing the high jump one leg first, right? And he started doing it. He was the first person to start going backwards, doing the backflip over the high jump, and he was winning gold medals and totally outing all of the competition, like going far higher than everybody else for ten years before everybody else went, “Oh, actually, maybe we should do it that way. Maybe that’s better. He seems to be getting better results.” Why does it take ten years? Because this is the way we’ve always done things. We’re going in that direction, and we like to keep going in that direction. That’s our comfortable, is to keep doing the thing that we’ve always been doing. And perhaps keeping doing the thing you’ve always been doing is going the wrong way.

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