Here’s your riddle: A city council has 4 hours to discuss three agenda items, the construction of a newly proposed nuclear power plant, the widening of a road, and the proposal to build a community bike shed near the local park. The question - how will they spend their 4 hours?
I can hear you now, “simple enough,” you say, “spend the most time on the complicated issues like the power plant proposal and only a few minutes on the simple stuff such as the bike shed. How is this a riddle?” If only, dear reader, it was this simple.
In its stated form, Parkinson’s law of triviality says, “The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum [of money] involved." As such, we would answer the riddle by explaining that a reactor is so vastly complex and costly that an average person cannot understand it, as a result the council assumes that whoever would work on it understands it, table the issue and move on - 10 minutes. However, every council member can visualize a simple, cheap bike shed. Consequently, there will be endless discussions around every detail because everyone involved wants their personal touch and contribution to be clearly seen, incessant discussion - two and a half hours.
In a former life I was a reporter, responsible for monitoring state legislation impacting education. A young idealist at heart, I was confident I’d be writing about important new policies and laws addressing education’s most pressing challenges. Instead, I found myself sitting through 4-hour committee meeting arguments about whether banners should be allowed on the back of school buses. The wasted hours were staggering, hours that could’ve been spent talking about the broken school funding system that relies primarily on property taxes. But instead of hitting the important, dangerous, complex, unknown issues, we sat there, talking about banners on buses.
I wish I could say that all ended when I started working in tech as a product manager. The truth is that Parkinson’s law can be found among any group of people trying to accomplish something.
(If you’ve never had the opportunity to read “Parkinson’s law” then you are missing out. It’s a short read that will be well worth your time and money.)
This mastering of the trivial should be warning sign to any product manager. This is design by committee. This is the death spiral of an otherwise perfectly healthy product or project. This is what happens when an organization losses urgency and customer focus, when we conflate communication with progress. It’s what happens when the person(s) responsible for the product either won’t or can’t say “no” to the flood of input, ideas, ego, and uncertainty coming from any more powerful set of stakeholders. And the truth is, it’s like gravity within most organizations. Because we spend our days with coworkers and not customers. Trying to impress and placate each other more than solve a real problem in the real world. It’s the increasing of product entropy at its finest.
I remember as an early PM, when I and the director of product were presenting new product features in front of the company leadership, eliciting feedback as we wrapped up. Instead of discussing key points about product market fit or user value the discussion turned almost instantly to button color and the intersection of two grey lines on the header menu. I imagined what jumping off a cliff must feel like. Then I took a breath and attempted to re-direct the conversation to the big product questions, “Yes, our button color should be consistent, what you’re looking at here is just a mock, not the final design. What we are really interested in thinking about is if orienting the search feature as the primary way users navigate is the right user experience approach given how our user are already used to finding this information.”
My first memory of this, as a freshly minted PM, is now seared into my professional reflexes. A mentor of mine once described decision making as “the velocity of an organization”. When you start to notice your ratio of energy-expended to decisions-made dropping, step back and re-evaluate what conversations you are having; you might be having trivial conversations about what you know, (the bike shed), instead of what is important.