As a great paper on project management noted, the biggest factor in determining the success or failure of a
project is a shared, crisp vision (or lack thereof). In the same vein, there's a
great quote in the book Good to Great that talks about how said vision
should be framed:
If you had the opportunity to sit down and read all 2000+ pages of the transcripts from the Good to Great interviews, you'd be struck by the utter absence of talk about "competitive strategy." Yes, they did talk about strategy, and they did talk about performance; they did talk about becoming the best, and they even talked about winning. But they never talked in reactionary terms and never defined their strategies principally in response to what others were doing. They talked in terms of what they were trying to create, and how they were trying to improve relative to an absolute standard of excellence.
And
the thing that continues to amaze me is that smart people at successful
companies still form weak visions based on features, assumptions and
the competition rather than on customer needs. It's a lot like the Cargo Cults*
of the South Pacific during and after WWII, as if going through the motions of product planning will somehow magically cause great products to appear. For example:
- Requirements docs include screenshots of the competition.
- Executives ask the question "How are we going to beat [most successful competitor]?"
- Features are added just to put a check mark on the box.
* Here I thought I was being clever with the Cargo Cult analogy, but of course my hero Richard Feynman used a similar analogy over 30 years ago. Ah well, at least I'm in good company.
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