James King

People often refer to “Utopia” as a good idea, but not something real.

Sometimes they go further and hold a meaningful discussion about what a (near) perfect world could look like, as in this book on the subject https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/everyday-utopia-kristen-ghodsee-sas

This is a great topic for discussion, but I wonder if we can use a view of Utopia for the practical purpose of setting our goals at work. For example, the quarterly OKRs or the product roadmap.

I know some companies like Toyota set a long term goal that is many years away and then break it into near term goals, such as this Net Zero plan that goes out to 2050 https://www.toyota.com/usa/environmentalsustainability/goals-and-targets.

But that doesn’t help me because

1. It is too far away. I struggle to plan for the next 2 weeks, so the next 2 decades is well outside my focus
2. It is not Utopia, it is just a better world that we have today

What I have in mind is to define perfection for a product, a team or something similar and then use that as a goal.

This sounds really dumb

I have heard ideas get shot down with the phrase “that sounds like Utopia, but what can we achieve in the short term”. This criticism of big ideas makes sense in a world where we want MVP’s, short release cycles and cool agile things. So Pursuing Utopia sounds anti-real-planning.

I myself use the term “Perfection is the enemy of good.”

I do that to shatter dreams early and focus on the achievable. My thinking is that small steps are better than big unplanned journeys.

But I think it could work

The problem with short cycles of work and small wins is that they can become a random walk instead of a deliberate journey in a chosen direction.

People can fix this by having a North Star, or maybe a vision. Toyota apparent envision something like this: https://global.toyota/en/company/vision-and-philosophy/global-vision/

The vision then allows you to know what good looks like and prioritise the smaller steps (OKRs, Sprint Goals, Stories) to head in that direction.

But I wonder if we could have something more specific and impossible. Something like:

• We will release changes daily
• We will have zero bugs found by users
• Our users will all love the product
• Every user will complete their user journey’s in less than 1 second and see the benefit immediately
• We will never allow security issues or compliance breaches
• We will make heaps of money out of this
• We will employ heaps of people and they will have good career options
• We will produce and maintain our products almost for free

OK – I admit that is talking about Utopia. It is a vision that we will never achieve, as compared to the broad vision that Toyota might in theory achieve.

So we might become sad and uninspired and just start building bad things because there is no point to life or product delivery.

But I don’t think that would happen. I think we could say:

• This is the ideal state, we are nowhere near it
• Every initiative we deliver will move us closer to this goal or move us further away
• We want to prioritise the portfolio of initiatives that do the best job this quarter of moving us closer.

So we might have some projects that we can prioritise

• Replace legacy system with a modern apist service thing
• Clean up a bad user experience
• Add a new feature to allow people to change the front screen in the app to include cat videos

Then we delete anything that moves us away from the ideal world (like having cat videos in the app instead of videos of red pandas).

Then we assess how much closer each initiative brings us toward ideal (benefits I guess) and how each one creates an impediment that stops us moving toward ideal (disbenefits I guess).

So rather than a metric or a broad vision we would refine an ideal state and then try to close the gap.

Is that something you do, or should do? Or am I just talking about Utopia?