Fill your gut, then trust it

Many hard product problems are instances of the same single problem. Your gut has the solution to it (under two conditions).

The grand problem is known as "explore versus exploit." Given finite resources and a compelling opportunity in front of you, do you execute on it (exploit) or do you hold out for an even better one (explore)? This problem is everywhere: do you continue chipping away at one business problem or switch to another one? Do you fully iron out this feature or do you move on to prototyping the next? Do you hire this candidate or continue interviewing others? Even everyday problems like picking a parking spot are instance of explore versus exploit.

The bad news is that despite its prevalence, there is no generally optimal solution to it. Researchers have been looking for one at least since World War 2. Allied scientists were trying to understand which weapons programs to invest in given limited time, money, and expertise. According to legend, it proved so difficult that the researchers considered posing the problem to German scientists in order to slow their progress on more tractable problems.

The solution

Despite there being no known generally optimal strategy, it's easy to try a strategy and retrospectively evaluate how well it worked. It turns out animals (that's you) have a pretty damn good strategy sitting somewhere inside our cognitive machinery. Foraging for food is perhaps the most fundamental instance of explore versus exploit. Do I eat every berry from this bush, even the hard-to-reach ones, or do I search for the next bush which may have lower hanging fruit? When we observe animals doing this the strategy they deploy - thus far unrepresented in human language or mathematical models - is quite close to optimal. What this tells me: trust your gut. We’re only having this conversation thanks to some algorithm iterated and tested and matured over 3+ billion years of good-enough solutions.

The two catches:

Animals are only good at this when:

1. They are deeply familiar with the territory, and

2. They are not already dead

To utilize your intuitive foraging techniques, your first objective is to not starve to death. The second objective is to build intuition in the exact landscape you wish to thrive in. You should build a reserve of cash, goodwill, and time by taking easy wins where they're available, especially early on in a new role/problem/product. This reserve will be critical to draw from when you explore more ambitious frontiers. But these easy wins must also build your familiarity with the terrain you actually want to target. Easy wins in adjacent territory - a nearby problem space, for example, or a slightly different customer shape - will fill your belly but not help you build an intuition for the landscape.

One last thing: Velocity matters.

Every second of deliberation - on any decision - burns calories. Every second spent making up reasons to substantiate your intuition burns calories. The sooner you can trust your intuition, the better. It’s okay if you can’t put words to the under-the-hood algorithm that drives your intuition. It has evaded description for a long time, and has worked quietly in the background for much, much longer.

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Thanks for reading! All feedback is appreciated.

Figure-Grounds is a newsletter about products, the organizing behind them, and the psychology behind the organizing. It’s written by me, Ethan Bond. I’ve spent the last 8 years building software products in close collaboration with some of the most complex organizations in the world, including pharmaceutical companies, intelligence agencies, and energy producers. I’ll be using this newsletter to find out what I know and to share the most useful bits with you.