// Blog
What would Goldilocks do?
Originally published on Tumblr.
Paying attention to feedback is important. We know that. We also know that we need to be careful about how quickly we react it. At my company, when we get feedback we always ask ourselves: “What would Goldilocks do?”
I’m sitting in a hackathon in the middle of Kansas, and I’m learning things. I’m learning things about our API from people who are using it. I’m learning even more from people who aren’t using it. I’m learning what they’d really like to do, if only we exposed the data they want. This is exciting.
It’s so exciting that the first thing I do is turn around and tell my whole team about what I’m learning. And then they get excited. That’s great, as long as we all keep it in perspective.
Reacting to feedback is, of course, what building a startup is all about. Everyone knows about. But we rarely take the time to consider the rhythm of our reactions, both at an individual and at a corporate level.
In a tech startup we deal with three fundamental reaction rhythms:
- Message: fast
- Product: medium
- Business: slow
Testing messages requires lots of fine tuning and lots of interactions. These interactions are fast-paced: tell a story, watch/listen to how it’s received, adjust the story, and tell it again. Each iteration could take as little as 30 seconds. That’s the message reaction rhythm.
Adjusting product is a much slower affair, for two reasons. The biggest is the importance of shipping. If you don’t ship you can never get the necessary market feedback. More on that below. But another reason this rhythm is so much slower is because products are a lot more complex than messages. Messages are bite sized. Products, especially the kind of software products we build, are complex. Features often depend on each other, and engineering constraints can never be ignored. How often should product features be considered? In our company, no more frequently than once a week. And considering a new feature, or a change to a feature is only step one. Once we agree on a change it might take weeks to design and implement.
This reaction rhythm determines what the market sees, and it in turn reacts with its dollars, because dollars, or a worthy proxy, are the signal that affect the business rhythm. A business has long-term goals. These goals don’t change very often. When they do, the business changes, or pivots to use more modern jargon. The primary driver of business change is product consumption.
Today I’m talking to people who want to use our product, gathering product feedback. It’s not going to affect work in progress. We need to ship. But it may affect our medium term product plans, i.e., it may change the way the product evolves.
Whenever we get feedback, we try to ask ourselves the question: what would Goldilocks do? We know that to effectively respond to input we have to do it at the right rhythm, the Goldilocks rhythm.
Reacting too slowly to message feedback means it might take too long to evolve the message.
Reacting too quickly to product feedback means never shipping, but reacting too slowly guaranties that people won’t buy it, because there’s nothing for them to buy!
And of course we all know that pivoting too late, i.e., not fundamentally changing a business that can’t work, is a guarantied path to failure. The inverse is also true: pivoting too fast, i.e., not “sticking with it”, is a great way to avoid success.