I’m lucky that i meet with very smart people, people who have vision, people who deeply understand very complex problems.
Many of these founders are great engineers and builders, but due to the complexity of the problems they’re solving, their solutions can be equally complex.
This complexity makes it hard to sell, hard to innovate, hard to iterate. I see the manifest itself with the product thats never ready to launch and sell, or a waterfall approach to development that results in products that are very hard to change once released.
Often the concept of an MVP (minimum viable product) is paraded around as a key to good product development, but underlying that is a more root concept.
Simplicity.
This excerpt from Jobs sums in up perfectly.
“It takes a lot of hard work,” Jobs said, “to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions.” As the headline of Apple’s first marketing brochure proclaimed in 1977, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
Its not that we should ONLY strive for simplicity. but we definitely be focused on reducing complexity.
Complexity increases risk, it acts as a force multiplier on the probability of errors.
The more nodes in a network, the more connections, the more connections, the harder to control. The same can be applied to a business or a product, complexity reduces your ability to control and your ability to quickly remedy errors.
Its therefore the leaders job to simplify, to reduce complexity and ensure that the team doesn’t get overwhelmed.
To do this, we need to focus on 3 steps. they should be pretty self-explanatory:
- break the problem into smaller more manageable parts
- align the focus – ensure that the smaller ‘sub-problems’ are aligned with the vision and focus of the business goals, not distractions.
- prioritise and assign responsibilities for each of these ‘sub-problems’.
- Execute and track