Outline of war as a metaphor for product development (and business in general)
It's not a perfect analogy, but a good enough metaphor, or mental) model as some would say. And as George Box famously said, "All models are wrong, but some are useful." Similarly, I do believe there is something useful about thinking of winning in a product development context by borrowing some aspects from military theory of the outline of a war.
Now, obviously, there's much more at stake at war—literally too often lives. It's not the case in product development, but military units are known for outstanding teamwork, and that's a lot of what it takes to win in business as well. Hence, the utility of the metaphor, in my view.
Here's how I see the metaphor playing out:
What we are focused on now from a strategic angle is like a Campaign. It gives the boundaries, the constraints, where we should operate, and with what kind of commitment. In a product development context, that will typically have a horizon ranging from 1 year to several years, occasionally shorter than that.
Each Campaign is made up of Battles, which is when we get more specific about certain goals or objectives we want to achieve in certain areas. How many of those we can properly sustain with the people and resources we have has to be limited, or we risk having too many fronts while we can't make meaningful progress on any of them. So focus is key—also from a time horizon point of view, where in a product development context, we will typically talk about several weeks to months (with quarterly being a frequent choice as it aligns with other typical business timelines).
A Battle is composed of different Engagements, which is precisely how we should think about tactically winning the battle. In a product development context, that often has a time horizon of a week to a few weeks (with two-week sprints being a very common pattern). Here, again, it is also crucial to understand how much you can sustain in parallel and on how many battlefronts you should be making progress right now. Also, being mindful that you can't be in Strike mode all the time and that you need to keep maintaining resources (in product development, things like technical excellence items would fit here) that are needed to continue striking and engaging.
What I am also trying to get at here is that each of those levels has its own context and requires some level of strategic thinking to make things happen. A common pattern of mistake I observe (in product development but also in business in general) emerges in a twofold dynamic:
Leadership does make an effort to clarify what the Campaign level looks like and what the big goals and things we should go after are.
But then jump straight on Engagement and Strike levels, leaving it up to teams and units to figure out how to execute on those. That would come at a very high transactional cost of coordination, relying on middle-layer management to ensure that.
And here's where things can go rogue:
Those are often the very same people that should be helping teams and units come together and see the same thing in the right context and level of granularity, thus being strategic about coordinating the efforts so that the battles can be won. But quite often, they won't have the time for that.
Figuring out the dynamics of going from and to different levels, with the right people having the same context (visualization, progress, feedback loops, etc.), so that the right conversations can happen, and doing it in a way that is simple, effective, and enabling towards the teams and units executing (engaging and striking)—that's the challenge. A very hard one to get very good at, yet worthwhile to try. And the best news is that there's no right or wrong, and we can just get started and evolve, learning as we go along, in a journey to discover how to make it work in your context.
By Rodrigo Sperb, feel free to connect (I only refuse invites from people clearly with an agenda to ‘coldly’ sell something to me), happy to engage and interact