This document discusses how companies often get caught in a cycle of focusing on tactical problem solving and feature requests rather than strategic work as they gain product market fit. This leads teams to feel busy but not accomplish important goals and leaves customers unsatisfied. It recommends using systems thinking to select work that solves big problems by developing a strategy with clear measures of success focused on customer value and business benefits while accounting for constraints. Regular inspection and adaptation is key to emerging the best strategy through experimentation and learning.

1. Systems Thinking Our Way Out
How to Work Smart and Overcome Our Addiction to Busy Work

2. When companies find product market fit they
begin to focus less on strategic work and more
on tactical problem solving.

3. Feature requests come from every angle.
There is an endless sea of potential work

4. We feel good fixing problems.

5. But this fleeting
feeling of
accomplishment
comes at a great
expense

6. Soon everything seems important

7. But do our customers really care?

9. How did we get here?

10. Findings
● This is a common pattern of
people across industries,
company sizes, and stages
● Often the smartest people are
the most busy
● It is extremely difficult for
individuals to break out of the
pattern even when they
recognized the problem

12. We need to think bigger than ourselves

14. ● Copier
● Printer
● Scanner
● Fax
● Stapler
● Magician
● Steak Knife
● Baby sitter

16. What problem
are you here to
solve?

17. 1. our most important features get buried
2. sometimes even they don’t work well
when we don’t know the problem

18. We keep adding and
never anything take
away.
We never have time to
improve the way we
work because we’re too
busy doing work or
cleaning up “Fires”

19. Building is the easy part of the
product development process.
Figuring out what to build and
how we are going to build it is
the hard part.

21. Ask yourself
Are we measuring success on outcomes?

22. Do We Work with
Clear Measures
of Success?

24. Ask Yourself
Are we aligning work with root problems?

25. My Boss doesn’t
have a Status
Update
Problem Solution
Write a status
update

26. Work problems
are not the lack of
work solutions.

27. We’re here to
solve BIG
problems.

28. We need a logical
structure for
selecting good
work.

29. We need strategy

30. We should be able
to answer these
Questions
1. What is the most
important work?
2. Why should we do it
now?
3. How will we know if
we are successful?

31. Step 1: Situation

32. Complicated =
Confusion

33. Simplify.
Focus on the
important details.

34. Step 2: Intent

35. Clarify the Overall
Business Strategy

37. Step 3: Measurable Value

38. &Customer Value Business Benefits

39. Step 4: Constraints

41. Step 5: Inspect & Adapt

42. Strategy
is NOT a Plan

43. Strategy transforms
our work from a
wishlist of problems
to something focused
and grounded in our
understanding of the
situation

44. Build in Feedback

46. Strategy emerges from
experimentation and
validated learning

47. Build in feedback at every level of work design

48. Build in feedback on work delivery

49. Measure performance with data (and care)

50. Set a sustainable pace

51. Work Smart and value
Outcomes over Output

52. Thanks.