(A post in my “Role Models” series…)

Killing birds is just a metaphor; who'd want to hurt something this cute? Photo credit: Valerian Gaudeau (Flickr).

Most people optimize for a single outcome.

Ken Ebert is made of smarter stuff.

When I began my career, I was like many engineers — keenly aware of issues like code quality and performance, but not so clued in to customer experience or business priorities. I’d go to team meetings, get new assignments, and head back to my cube to code away. If I was unsure how to accomplish my goals, I’d ask a senior engineer, and do my best to reflect the values they cared about. After all, they were the experts.

It gradually dawned on me that some of my engineer mentors (not many; geeks are better-rounded than popular stereotypes make them out to be…) suffered from a kind of myopia. They could build complicated and highly functional things, but they had little interest in how their constructions mapped into sales, revenue, and company success. I went through a revolution in my perspective, got religion about user experience, and spent a lot of time learning from product management.

In 2003, Symantec acquired several companies in rapid succession, and threw five sites together into a new business unit with marching orders to build a suite and conquer the world. I was tasked with architecture across the picture, and my perspective expanded again. Now it wasn’t just a single product’s success I was worrying about — I had to make or shepherd design decisions that enhanced the profitability of multiple independent products as well as the amalgam of all of them. Was it more important to make codebase X localizable, or to invest in a better install for codebase Y? If team A moved to a newer version of tomcat, would it break the integration story for our suite or impose undue burdens on team B? Resources were constrained (they always are!), time was short…

I began to sense that the way I made decisions needed to change, but it wasn’t until I worked intensely with Ken Ebert, years later, that I could put into words exactly how.

Making wise decisions about architecture, SOP on dev teams, product features, investment in R&D versus marketing — it’s like trying to solve an equation with multiple variables. Profit maximization requires that you consider more than one input at a time. This is partly what I had in mind when I blogged about optimization.

Many times I’ve heard Ken say something like this: “I think we should make feature N the centerpiece of our next release.” And my first response has been, “That’s doable, but kinda boring. Why not focus on M instead?”

When Ken nods sagely at my question, I know what’s coming.

“N is glamorous, and low-risk, but it’s only useful to 3% of our customers. If we build M, we’ll address a sales inhibitor for half the funnel, plus we’ll be positioned to do features P and Q on our long-term roadmap, plus I’ll be able to get an analyst to write about it, plus …, plus …”

Ken doesn’t just kill two birds with one stone. He kills three, or five, or six.

I’m not sure how Ken manages to be so good at this, but here’s what I’ve done to try to approximate his success:

• Evaluate in multiple time horizons.
• Evaluate for the channel as well as direct sales.
• Evaluate for support and professional services as well as dev.
• Evaluate for marketing value.
• Evaluate for opportunity cost.
• Evaluate with an eye to domino effects.
• Evaluate for morale and momentum.
• Evaluate for technical debt.

Of course, nobody can do all of these, exhaustively, all the time. Don Kleinschnitz’s wisdom about putting a stake in the ground is an important counterbalance. But I find that I can think, at least briefly, about ramifications of a choice from multiple perspectives — and when I do, I often make better choices.

Thanks for the lesson, Ken.

Action Item

Look at the bulleted list of perspectives above; find one you've been neglecting. Pick a significant decision that's on the horizon, and spend some time thinking seriously about that decision in the context of the neglected perspective. What did you learn?