Productizing myself: scanning the adjacent possible
Here’s a quote from Marty Cagan, product management thought leader and partner at Silicon Valley Product Group:
“I tell founders that if you want to have any hope of solving problems and build the right products, you’re going to need to have at least 50 to 100 iteration attempts. And there is just no way to do that by using your engineers to build 4-month MVPs. If you have your engineers build a 4-month MVP and deploy it, and it doesn’t actually do what you want, you have just wasted 4 months out of an 18-month runway.”
A little over a decade ago I decided to write a book. I had no formal experience in writing, but I was passionate enough to quit my day job to write full-time. So I locked myself up and put pen to paper day after day. In two years I had a manuscript of more than 300 pages ready. When I was through with my first full draft, I imagined I was done with the most difficult part. But that was not to be.
What does Marty’s quote have to do with my experience of writing a novel, you may ask. I had a runway of 2–3 years before my money ran out and I spent most of it in one uninterrupted build. I felt protective enough of my early work to not show it to people around me (potential readers) or to scout for agents who would have a nose for picking signal from noise. There was no feedback loop guiding my decisions because I did not put out a minimum viable product, pick up feedback, iterate, ship again until I was confident of a better market fit. Instead, when after being through with my full draft I finally sought responses from literary agents and friends alike, it was difficult to make any meaningful improvements without running the risk of toppling a Jenga stack.
Iteration
Productizing oneself to me means iterative development. Make small builds, put a newer version out, show it to people, listen to what they say, fine-tune. These adjustments are what you need to make to push yourself closer to the most updated version of you. You don’t know if something you have matters to the world but by putting it out there you hear back soon enough. My girlfriend then (wife now) told me I should try writing funny stuff and that she couldn’t remember reading too many famous funny writers. I ignored the odds she was pointing to because I was consumed by the idea of creating this serious literary work. I overlooked a crucial question: Is what I’m doing something the world wants but doesn’t know where to find? My work was a labor of love all right, but it wasn’t a viable product. It was built for an imaginary, untested market.
Adjacent possible
I was introduced to the concept of the adjacent possible in Cal Newport’s “Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You.” The idea itself has got a complex-system-biology origin story, and is attributed to Stuart Kauffman, an evolutionary biologist. The adjacent possible is the space of untapped potential, of opportunities, that opens up once you’re at the cutting edge of your craft. A new skill or idea often works with existing ones in unique combinations to bring about non-incremental results. It is hard to model these results beforehand and even harder to isolate the drivers. To that end, it stands in contrast to big hairy audacious thinking. Adjacent possibility is about actuality in the proximal, as opposed to aspirational-ity in the distance.
In my own case, as an aspiring writer, instead of carefully evaluating the skills at my disposal and marshalling them in new ways, I remained fixated on the idea of a traditional literary novel and answered to that construct. This commitment to my intuition came at a significant personal cost and, while admirable and instructive in its own way, was not sanity-checked by anything outside my head.
In the process of scanning adjacent possibilities, technology and the Internet act as huge enablers, drastically cutting down the time from idea to reality. I did not use these tools. Perhaps I could have marketed my writing on social media and gauged interest early on, or stripped down the story to its keystone idea and self-published a novella, or done things to cultivate a brand that would have made it easier for a publisher to sign me up. I missed out on adjacent possibilities by closing myself off.
The grind
Getting to the adjacent possible is not a linear process. It is probably not always a forward process either. No matter how clear the map in your head, the territory you have to cover with it will not be to scale. The journey is non-deterministic and made up of incremental steps that present forks in the path at various points. You pass through stages. Yet it is not mandatory for you to tick all the boxes along the way, and it is not the same sequence of boxes either, but at every milestone a bigger opportunity presents itself and you make a choice.
It’s why a stand-up comic hones their set every evening or why a blogger puts out content regularly. This is what is called the grind. But going through the grind is invaluable. The signals you pick up from exposing your early work to critical feedback are what will inform your future decisions, and lead you on to be the best version of yourself. That is another way to say, When you productize yourself you choose to put yourself through an iterative process of self-refinement that leads you to harness adjacent possibilities and build a version of yourself that’s better than ever before.
In the process of productizing yourself too, the more relevant skills you acquire the more possibilities emerge. The skills you learn anew are juxtaposed with what already exists to offer unimagined reconfigurations of what is possible. Imagine if you had a high vocal range, a sense of humor, and some stage presence — you could plausibly be that comic who delivers her jokes in soprano? Yet one thing is certain, if you never sang a set of jokes to an audience and lived to see their reaction, you definitely would settle with being either a singer or a comic, never both.
Thank you Atul Sinha for reading drafts of this and sharing your thoughts.
