One week roadmaps

16 Aug 2024 · Ravdeep Singh

TL;DR: processes are better than goals at getting desired outcomes.

Most of my career has been in product management with the initial few years doing management consulting. As someone driving product strategy as a day job, the most counterintuitive thing I learnt is that strategy is far inferior to exection. Nothing feeds the compounding growth engine more than calm, focused execution.

Mathematically, if a feature is expected to say bring 10% incremental revenue in an year, shipping it one week early is a 0.2% (10/52) additional revenue made this week. Extracting small gains across all parts of the org could be an additional 0.5-1% revenue made this week just by being fast.

Doing this every week for an year has two side effects:

  1. People incrementally build a body of knowledge around what customers really want, versus saying they want it or not understanding tradeoffs.
  2. The culture of the organization is metrics focused and questions that all smart people ask are of the form: "is there a 20% opportunity? bigger than this current 10% one?".

This is unlike orgs where instead of making the core product which has an established market better, people obsess about building shiny things.

The framework is applicable to all other parts of life. There's a meaningful difference in saying I want to lose 5Kg v/s I will hit 1000 move calories everyday on my apple watch. The latter approach is how the human brain functions and I lean into it. Processes > Outcomes for hitting goals.

Wafrow is a labour of love for me as a solo entrepreneur where I don't need to convince any stakeholder. The only thing that matters is delighting my customers a little bit more, weekly. I don't need a grand plan to take over the world, just some rapid clickity clack on this keyboard. Hence, one week roadmaps.