At my job we’re working on streamlining and improving our project development process — indeed something that should be a manager’s perpetual state. In growing our expertise in how to plan and onboard new projects, we’re always iterating on our method. We’re cracking the nut for finding the “right” thing to build. To that end, I’m going to implement on my team a concept that I’m calling Continuous Curiosity.
The basic premise for Continuous Curiosity is to take a mindset of “well, what if…” about major design and functionality decisions. At a big company it’s easy to get a Project brief and accept the terms and go off and do the work. At Alchemy, our stance is that we have Products that live for an indeterminate amount of time. We can’t solve today’s problems and ignore tomorrow’s.
A single Project ≠ Product.
Here are some of the questions I want Engineers asking of themselves and their peers when coming up with ideas:
- What does the customer need “next year”?
- What do you not know that you don’t know?
- Who is the customer’s customer? Do we solve their problems?
- How future-proof is your plan?
- Can this run for a month with no Humans? A year? Forever?
I want us to be thinking about the future whenever we’re planning and whenever building. I don’t want to solve the problem immediately in front of us, I want to look past that to the next problem and solve that. When we do that, we will have solved both and pushed our customer to succeed before they even knew they needed to.
The flip side of this paradigm is that it’s easy to die a “death by committee”. Everyone has to question everything and no one has the answers and so nothing happens. This is not the ideal state. The trick to making this work is to accept that some of your hypotheses may be wrong, but so what? We’re building software and digital solutions — we can change them easily. We will apply the same obsessive curiosity to our A/B tests and the changes we decide to implement.
Your job is not (only) the code
When the dust settles, my job isn’t just to deliver technology. My job is to help my company sell high quality products to consumers. And we have the best products in the world, believe me. I live every day here thinking about that and I shape every decision I make regarding my work and my team’s work around that premise. The best piece of technology in the world doesn’t (necessarily) sell more body wash.
When you take really smart people and give them the opportunity to be as creative and forward thinking as possible, you get great output. Being Continually Curious is how we will continue to win.