Jan 16, 2025

No Plan, No Progress

Patching something broken takes forever. Starting over is seductive in the specific way that throwing out old notebooks is, you feel lighter for about a week, maybe two.

Either way you end up back in a room with the same people and a blank page.

A room full of smart people solving the wrong thing with great energy is one of the more demoralising things to watch, because everyone is trying and the trying is the problem.

Most hard decisions that go badly wrong, somebody in that room had a feeling about it and no language to defend it against a Gantt chart. A decent plan gives you that language. Gives you something to point at when everything around it has gone sideways, which it will.

Anyway, without that, you're just busy.

A plan gives you language

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About Max Antonov
I'm a father of three from Sydney, a Product Director and a Product Coach. I write about product management and run the Product Manager community.

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