Measuring Progress Redux: Going Slow to Go Fast

About a year ago I wrote a post about my struggle to learn how to do a handstand press. It was a physical feat that looked easy enough when I set it as a goal. Yet it proved very humbling. I didn't reach it during the year I had given myself, but I learned a lot.

I learned to accept myself and my limits. I learned that life gets in the way of arbitrary fitness challenges. I learned there are a lot of tiny little muscles and physiology that ladder up to what we know as balance. I felt like a toddler learning to walk.

Most of all, I learned that persistence and discipline builds the strength and foundation to accomplish new and greater challenges.

I'm happy to say that a few weeks ago I finally did it. After literally thousands of failed attempts over the past 2.5 years, it just happened. I was traveling to visit a customer and went to yoga class in the morning. When we got to the part of the class where the teacher says "if handstands are a part of your practice, you can do that now." So I leaned my weight into my hands and started to lift my feet off the ground. And in a moment that felt both spontaneous and practiced - I was upside down. And just to make sure it wasn't completely spontaneous, I've been doing it every day now for a month.

Okay, bravo, buddy... What's this got to do with business?

Well, you may have heard the phrase "go slow to go fast," proposed by Dr. Peter Senge at MIT. I was first introduced to the idea by Cheryl Ainoa and Nicholas Oddson , who are 2 of the most inspiring and talented tech leaders I've had the honor to work with. It came up at D2L during the company's transition to cloud hosting and continuous software delivery - a transition that took time and focus, but now pays dividends to customers and D2Lers alike.

The concept of going slow to go fast centers around building appropriate foundation and infrastructure to support growth and acceleration - not just velocity. Over the past few years, I've spent a lot of time thinking about how to build this idea into the teams I manage.

My team at D2L is responsible for overseeing the "sandbox" environments for our prospective customers to have access to our software solutions. It seems a little mundane, but in the modern product led growth buyer mentality, these environments have a huge impact on how our products are perceived by potential buyers. And there's a shocking amount of thought and energy that is involved in making these types of environments technically scalable, while presenting your product in its best light.

Under the leadership of Mark Gierach , this SE Operations team has built an amazing foundation for continuous innovation. They've built structures and frameworks for design, implementation, data population, documentation, account registration, and internal training. They've also developed reporting to support experimentation, and mechanisms to implement iterative enhancements to the experience. It's a really amazing thing, and it's taken years of patience and focus to build a stable foundation.

D2L is launching an exciting new product called Creator+, which empowers content creators to make beautiful instructional content without needing to know web design. As part of that launch, I was working with our product leaders to determine how we can give prospective buyers an opportunity to get their hands on the new offering, before its official release. It's a tool that is so intuitively designed, once folks get a chance to try it out...it basically sells itself.

So, on a Friday afternoon in August, I sent a Slack message to Lindsay Shipman, MPEd to see if she had any ideas on how we could make it easy to get hands on the product. Within a few minutes of discussion, we had a rough plan of how to make it happen.

From that initial planning session, it took about 5 weeks to go from ideation to production. Now anyone who's interested in the product can go from "I've never seen it before" to "take my money!" in about 5 minutes by just going to a web page and filling in a few form fields. For perspective, a couple of years ago this process would have probably taken us a year.

I'm incredibly proud of the work this team has done. The ability to iterate and quickly adjust to an evolving market is a key to our success. But the thing I find most remarkable is the discipline and planning this team has undertaken to build a foundation that can support any challenge it faces. They've "done the work" to create strong scaffolding.

They've taken a slow and methodical path to make it easy to go fast when the circumstances require it.