Writing Yourself Into a Corner
You might know that fans of the Game of Thrones series of fantasy novels by author G.R.R. Martin are desperately waiting for the next book. The most recent one was published in 2011. The reasons for the delay are nuanced, but it's also observed that Martin has opened up many diverging plot lines that he must now thread together over the course of the final two books. As far as writing is concerned, it must be fun introducing characters, locations, and connections, leaving hints and clues that point toward epic conclusions. But too much of it, and it becomes impossible to bring it all together in a satisfactory way. In other words, if an author isn't careful, they'll write themselves into a corner that they can't get out of.
Well, the same is true at all levels of product development. More features. More use cases. More code. Before you know it, you've developed yourself into a corner where it's impossible to bring everything together into a coherent whole. Adding a new feature becomes prohibitively difficult because of all the added complexity. And the more features you already have, the more adverse interactions you'll find, until everything slows to a crawl.
The antidote to this is not rigid planning. We do need to account for discoveries. Users give feedback about features, and we should be responsive to that. Don't even try to map out an exact product roadmap three years out.
The real antidote is a set of higher principles for the product. Call it a vision (but not the nebulous, vague kind!) if you want. It's the one decision that makes all the downstream decisions easier. This can take different forms. A common one is to identify your Ideal Customer Profile, what legendary founder Jason Cohen calls your Carol. Everything you do, you do for Carol. So for every feature, you ask: Would Carol love this?
The vision tells you where you're going and why, but doesn't prescribe every turn on the way there. It does allow you to tell apart a quick detour from a major deviation, and that's all you need.
