At some point in your career all the stars will align. You’re working on an exciting, groundbreaking new project. Even better everyone else in your organization thinks the same. They’re falling over themselves to help out, remove blockers, get stuff done for you. The CEO calls out your project in the company all hands. It may just be the future of the organization.
This is part of a series describing Organizational Anti-Patterns. They are based on behaviors I’ve seen first hand, have heard from others or read about. They are NOT all about Autodesk. Those that are inspired by my time at Autodesk often reflect Autodesk as it was some years ago rather than as it is now.
Enjoy it. Make the most of it. It won’t last.
Maybe there was a reorg, an acquisition or a mandate that changed the environment. Maybe your project is taking a while to deliver results. Doesn’t matter - for whatever reason the new hotness is here. And your project is now the Old New Thing.
Becoming the Old New Thing is not an anti-pattern in and of itself. That’s human nature. This is just the Gartner Hype Cycle playing out within your organization.
The anti-pattern is in how the organization reacts. What will prevent your project eventually reaching the Plateau of Productivity after it passes over the Peak of Inflated Expectations?
Crash and Burn
If your project really is exciting and groundbreaking then the most likely outcome is that it will crash and burn well before reaching the Trough of Disillusionment. All those things that inflated expectations quickly go into reverse. Your project is now too risky, unlikely to work, a luxury that can be cut. Even more so if its an early stage project that doesn’t have customers yet.
Many large companies exist on the back of their original, highly successful product. They often find it hard to create new successful products. This is one of the reasons why. They don’t need to make your project work. It’s easier not to make the commitment. Look, there’s a new bandwagon to jump on that will be even better.
Zombie Product
The Trough of Disillusionment is where Zombie Products live. They limp along supporting a small number of customers but never really take off. No VP wants to put in the effort and investment needed to crawl up the Slope of Enlightenment. After all, there’s a new shiny ball to chase after. No one even wants to talk about them. At the same time, it’s too much effort to kill them off. There’s always at least one important customer that needs to be kept happy.
Working on a Zombie Product is a thankless task. Your small team (it’s always a small team) does its best to keep the product alive. People leave and are never replaced. The technology base ages. There’s no budget to keep things up to date.
Zombie Products are often the result of acquisitions that don’t work out, or “incubation” projects that fail to scale up.
I first encountered a Zombie Product early in my career. It was complementary to the product I was working on. Naively I was excited about the possibility of integrating with it. I was gently steered away. Nothing was explicitly said but everyone else knew that it was the Old New Thing and should be avoided.
How long can a Zombie Product survive? Most Zombie Products I’ve encountered are still active. That first one I encountered? It’s one of the few that was actually decommissioned. In this case, fifteen years later.
Competition
Competition is good, right? Well, not if you’re the Old New Thing. If there’s a fresh, new project in the same or an overlapping space it’s easy for people to see it as the natural successor to your presumably stale, failing project.
The textbook example is when a VP makes a move and acquires another product. As is almost always the case there is only partial overlap, so the acquired product isn’t a ready made replacement. However, some overlap is enough to reinforce your project’s position as the old new thing and speed up its progress to either crash and burn or become a zombie product.
The other common play is for another group in the organization to develop an overlapping project (usually without knowing about your project or one of the other five similar projects). The new project gets the hype and the momentum. Once their VP becomes aware of the other projects they express sadness and regret at the pointless duplication and suggest that everyone else abandons their clearly inferior projects.
Rewrite and Reimagine
Your project has somehow made it through the Trough of Disillusionment and is slowly climbing the Slope of Enlightenment. There is still a chance to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
It’s hard going. You have demanding customers. The code base is in a bit of a mess. The UX designers don’t like some of the choices they made in the early stages that are now baked firmly into the product. Progress is slowing down. There are exciting new technologies that weren’t available when you started out. There are fashionable new architectural patterns that all the cool kids are using. The engineers suggest that it might be time to rewrite the code. The UX designers are keen to reimagine how the product works. Everyone agrees that you will be able to do it better if you start over.
Do I need to convince you that rewriting from scratch is a terrible idea? Luckily, I don’t have to. Go and read Things you Should Never Do, Part 1 by Joel Spolsky and then come back.
Reimagining the product when you rewrite it makes things worse. The designers may have come up with a new more intuitive way of doing things but it doesn’t cover all the edge cases. You no longer have a replacement for the original product, you have an overlapping product. Rebuilding the product takes longer than you thought. You’re forced to launch with only a subset of the original features. The new product only meets the needs of a few of your existing customers. They don’t like that they have to retrain their users to do things a different way. Someone has the bright idea to find new customers unconstrained by the old ways of doing things. The new customers push for additional features that further diverge the new product from the old one.
The end result is that the old product falls back into the Trough of Disillusionment to join the other zombie products. The new product starts over from the beginning of the hype cycle.
Double Team
Life not complicated enough? Run two of these plays together. My personal favorite is when a product is making steady progress up the Slope of Enlightenment but a VP wants to speed things up. They acquire a competitor (not your biggest, somewhere in the number 2-6 range). There is some strategic thinking involved. The competitor is strong in an area of the market where you’re weak and vice versa. It’s complementary! They’ve plugged a hole in your offering and accelerated your progress to market domination.
Your customers don’t see it that way. They’re confused. Which product should they buy? They know how your organization treats the Old New Thing. They don’t want to back a loser. Meanwhile, your number one competitor’s offering is looking more attractive and certainly less confusing.
There’s only one solution. Time to Rewrite, Reimagine and combine the two products into one. You can try your hardest to minimize the change. Perhaps you can cherry pick the best features of each product and just integrate them together.
Marketing insist that the result needs to be presented as a whole new product. UX want to use a new design language that is consistent across the two halves and distinguishes the new product from the two old ones. The product managers want to enhance the features in the new product to differentiate them from the old products. Everyone is saying new product rather than combined product.
Before you know it you have two old products going to the Zombie graveyard and a new product that has a long journey ahead of it.