All of a sudden, your fire alarm goes off. Shit. Someone upstairs burnt their toasts again. Agh. You’ve got tons of things to do. This is not the first time, though. You’ve been there a few times. Pull the plugs, get the dog, fetch the wallet and keys, and run. Done before, validated before. This is the order of actions that get you over the line, each time. Is this the best approach or the best order? No, probably not. But it worked before. For you only, probably, but it works. You feel comfortable doing so over and over again.

As running from fire, you’re building your products following a particular, maybe a peculiar set of actions, special to you. Not spending any time doing research, focusing on prototypes overly, or expecting your developers to run tests. Whatever you do ingeniously, and whatever works for you, that’s what makes you and your organisation. That’s how you turn ideas into features. And to stand out in competition, you actually need this, a specific way of doing things to attract talent, outwit the competition, and get results, especially at the beginning of your journey.

Sitting on the core of how you do things, your PLM -product lifecycle management- approach is a big deal. No matter how simple or intricate it is, the actions you take to ship software represent you. It basically broadcasts how you think. You could be on either end of the spectrum, from not even being able to articulate your approach to holding meticulously drafted blueprints of your systems at your disposal. And where you sit on the spectrum does not necessarily tell how successful you’ll be. You may very well be following the most antiquated methods for building products, not conducting any research or shipping buggy features only to be fixed on the production environment. That does not determine how things would pan out. What matters is: one, how likely you keep on going with your approach, over and over and over again. And two, how well you make your users happy with your approach. That’s all.

On the flip side, your PLM approach gives conspicuous hints at how you think and how you’d like to think as an organisation. If it’s research-heavy, it shows that you have a skeptic mind as a collective, choosing validation over quick development. If you focus on shipping fast no matter what, it implies that you’re either good at managing mistakes or replacing talent fast enough. But, from a facade, in the game of talent acquisition in particular, explaining why you act in such a unique way when it comes to building products and how responsibilities are shared has more weight than you can imagine. Smart people like to see how you reason, how you make connections, and how you come to conclusions. You should be good at explaining why you act in a certain way, orally and empirically. And irrespective of the intricacies of your systems, you’d like to avoid having overlapping responsibilities as it clogs production and creates conflict between individuals. You’d like to show that there is a clear understanding of “who does what” to keep the momentum of production.

As scale changes, still regardless of how well the system you employ, you eventually face a different reality. Your approach must get leaner and more legible as time passes. It needs to lose all of its person-dependent components since with scale, any small clog may start causing significant delays. When small, you may even get away with not having a system at all. You just name responsibilities, toil hard, and voila, you’re shipping. Yet, with time, more and more individuals come aboard and everyone starts to bring their own interpretation of your system or expectations if things are not clear enough. You may still stick to your basic approach, but now you’re expected to have it out in the open and legible for anyone not to hamper production.

In a way, beyond your PLM perspective, it all boils down to the question of to what degree what you do is repeatable. As an organisation, from being a one-man show to having spread out to many time zones, any system in place is actually judged by its results and the repeatability of those results. From talent acquisition to production, you’re in the game for building things that bear results, including your PLM, which should be repeatable, bug-free, process-oriented, and hard-to-copy. Creating bug-free products in a non-human-oriented way with a unique manner at a high frequency defines your ethos. The latter, being hard-to-copy, is actually the secret sauce, that shows your quirkiness in your thinking to bring both talent and results. And you need that aspect to confuse your competitors too as they trying to figure out how you’re thinking while you’re getting results. It could be rooted in either secret suppliers, human factor, being unexpectedly too manual, or some combination of those.

Self-reflection and team retrospectives are helpful tools in this regard too. Keeping track of your quirkiness in doing things, individually or as a team, let you understand what needs to be improved to stay as a top choice for talent and stay on top of competition. Do things that don’t scale. Do things in your own way. Do things a bit weirdly to stay under the radar. Till your absurdity becomes the norm. Or till the flames reach you.