The difference between a Product and a Project ?
What is Cynefin ?
Several years ago a very smart colleague made a passing comment that “Joe” (named changed for protection of the innocent) didn’t know the difference between Project Management & Product Management. I didn’t either which nagged at me for a year or two until I came across a video by Fred George that mentioned something called Cynefin.
I worked for Fred way back and he’s one of the smartest people I know. Whenever he’d mention anything I’d not heard before I’d always make a mental note to read-up later.
Cynefin isn’t explicitly about Products or Projects but it is a way of classifying problems into types. Knowing the type of problem faced helps with understanding the best way to go about solving it.
Reading Cynefin the “Product vs Project” difference in my head crystalised from cloudy to blindingly obvious.
Simple, Complicated & Complex Problems
I won’t go into all of its classes now but simply the three types that are relevant to everyday work in a digital company.
Simple Problems
Last week I was setting up Amazon IAM access so that Data Dog could log archives to an s3 bucket in our account. There’s nothing trivial about that but it is a “simple” problem there’s just one best-practice way of solving it - follow the instructions.
Complicated Problems
Complicated problems have more than one way of solving them usually through a collection of “good practices”. I worked at a company that was implementing Salesforce. We tailored the Saleforce platform to give us the sales tooling we needed. For sure we weren’t the first people to use Salesforce and we knew exactly what we wanted to build. The challenge was to build it as time & cost efficiently as possible without cutting corners - aka “Good Practices”.
Complex Problems
The thing I like least about Cynefin is the way Complicated and Complex sound so similar when they are actually quite different.
Complex problems don’t have a notion of best practice. In the case of web startups that’s because no-one has built the website before - it’s a one-off built once (probably).
Unlike a Salesforce solution no-one even knows what success looks like when they start. They have to “cross the river by feeling the stones” learning as they go and - the good ones at least - prepared to pivot at any moment as lessons are learned.
Product vs Project
If you have a Complicated Problem - something that’s far from easy but its been built many times before and the challenge is to make the build efficient and robust then that’s when you need a Project Manager.
If you’re building a ‘disruptive web platform’ your problem is complex - no-one has built one before and you’re not even sure where the finish line is. That’s when you need a Product Manager.