Just-In-Time PM #7: Interaction Over Consumption

In Part 6, I recommended treating any deliverable (whether it’s a simple email all the way to a full-fledged product) as a series of evolutionary artifacts, each one intended to test an assumption or make forward progress.

But there is a deeper reason for downscoping deliverables and then evolving them through a series of stages.

So often our attitude toward information is one of consumption. We treat information intake as a preliminary stage, where we gather research and knowledge, followed by a planning stage, where we make decisions and lay out the steps, and then an implementation stage, where we actually put that knowledge into practice.

That model doesn’t make sense in the modern world. There is so much uncertainty and things are changing so fast, it makes much more sense to dive in and take action, than try to meticulously plan everything in advance.