You can explain every success story with the lenses of balance and cadence. When to push, and when to hit the brakes define a team’s championship story as it can define a marathon runner’s journey. Decisions start at a very granular level, as in which sprint you’ll push the limits and which sprint you’ll focus on bugfix. And it goes to the highest level too, which quarter you’ll be launching multiple products and which quarter you’ll sit tight and focus on improving performance.

If a group of people can make such decisions with high accuracy for a long period, then success becomes almost inevitable. Yet, this is way harder than it’s said.

First, most of the time there is no precedent for any decision, especially if you’re at an early stage. Yes, maybe the first couple of calls can be copied from the others’ answers, but as the number of choices mounts and the environment gets more nuanced, teams often find themselves in situations no one has encountered before.

Second, performing at a high level whilst everything is changing requires undivided attention and clarity around vision. From macro trends to your broadband connection, everything surrounding your business constantly moves, but you must maintain the same momentum to bring results. That’s a heavy duty.

Balance and cadence demand empathy and intuitiveness. One of the remarkable things that great runners do is setting a winning tempo. While aware of the competition but maintaining independence from it, great runners define their own timing, without comparing themselves to the rest of the race as they know with intuition when to go faster and when to take it easy. Their innate knowledge about their apparatus and their end goal, which is unique, creates a tailored formula for their objectives. Good teams and good leaders act with the same logic as well. The profiles of individuals forming a team, the goals, and the terrain -aka competition- each says something to a team leader who tries to strike the right balance and cadence to produce results.

Intuition is an odd thing. It can be cultivated by practice and experience. However, it mainly relies on a vast network of connections synthesised over studying a specific subject for a certain time. With good intuition about how things work in a particular domain, one gets less surprised at anything that is in any direction.

Visualisation is also crucial. Similar to flight simulators, excessive exposure to a set of conditions in unique scenarios trains muscle and decision memory in ways to act swiftly, which, as in aviation, turns out to be quite useful. At every stage, a product or an organization, can and should be tested against different scenarios as a thinking exercise by its pilots. This is the way to find flaws in thinking and also trains the pilots to stay calm in the face of crises. Being calm and content about crises radiates calmness towards the fuselage, and makes passengers not panic, which saves the crew from dealing with additional headwinds in a situation. Conversely, visualisation makes sense for good times too, to save pilots and crew from succumbing to the glory of the day, and push them to move on to the next checkpoint.

So take yourself and your team to think hard about your product. Test your product against rough conditions. Test your product against scenarios where users flock to it: What would be your first reaction? What steps would you take to maintain momentum? Utilize all the intuition you mustered along the way to build your product and train your initial reactions. Strive to build a not winning but a working formula for balance and cadence.