Project Choices

My daughters worked our poetry scavenger hunt like two bounty hunters holding warrants for everything on the list. They loved it. Then we got to the part where the pile of found things is supposed to turn into a poem, and the posse lost the trail.

Two moves show up in that moment, and anybody who has led anything knows them by heart.

Push: coax, check in, sweeten the deal with ice cream, ask again in ten minutes.

Or do it yourself. Write the poem, read it out loud, and let everybody pretend it was a group effort.

Work runs on the same two moves.

A project stalls and we either badger it or carry it. Follow-ups, nudges, a little incentive for whoever finally budges.

Or we stay late, build the thing ourselves, and then wonder why nobody else seems to care about it.

There’s a third move that only looks like quitting from up close: Pick a different project.

Every project on your plate right now is standing in front of a crowd of projects you quietly turned down. You never mourned them because you never watched them leave. Attachment is mostly just which one you happen to be facing.

I’ve launched the same kind of product at two companies, and both times what slowed it down wasn’t the product. It was everything else on the roadmap that also wanted to go first. You can badger a roadmap all quarter… I did… and it still fell to lower priority.

A stall is information, isn’t it though? Information is what we can decide to act on.

It’s the room telling you which part it’s willing to carry. And I’ll tell you, it took awhile to make the choice, but I ultimately let my efforts down to rest on that project while I focused on different product features.

Those other features? They were the most successful product launches for the company, too.

It’s refreshing to look back and think I could have pushed harder or done more of the work myself… but instead I chose a different project altogether and landed with a story I’m proud to share.

(You can imagine “No one was doing what needed to be done, so I did all the work.” isn’t a riveting interview pocket story… or one I’d care to tell my daughters when they’re on a poetry scavenger hunt.)

Stay Positive & The Choice Is Yours