Rhythm is all that matters

Our startup has been making some enviable progress with product development, especially over the past year. We have been able to release a clinically accepted product and been improving it at a speed that, according to our clients, is unparalleled amongst our peer groups that they work with.

In parallel, there has been a less notable but personally rewarding progress for me. I have been an amateur, for-fitness-only runner for over two decades plateauing at around 26 mins for a 5K and 57 mins for 10K. For years I had been struggling to break the 25 mins / 5K barrier without breaking my body. And fast forward, I now do a comfortable 23 min and 53 mins for a 5K and 10K respectively. And you may keep in mind that I am on the wrong side of 50.

Both these look unconnected. But there is a connection I found.

Runners watch their performance with a myriad metrics. Heart rate, pace, lap speed, stride length, Vo2 Max etc. But amongst all of them, there is one metric that’s obscure on a professional runner’s list. That is cadence. Meaning, steps per minute. That’s the metric I latched onto. I made sure I keep a certain cadence range all through my run using a metronome on my smartwatch. I increased the cadence by a little week on week. That’s the only thing I cared about. And that made all the difference. My speed started improving, though I did not even watch it that closely.

If you look carefully, life is all about rhythm.??Nature is all about rhythm. The world revolves to a cadence. Human body has its circadian rhythm. Animals procreate in seasons. Even a bad singer can get away with a decent performance if they follow a beat. And it’s claimed that while we were in the wombs, we got used to our mothers’ heart beats as the most comforting sound. And that’s probably why biologically we are wired to follow a cadence. We perform at our best when we move ourselves to a rhythm.

If we look at high performance companies, they work to a cadence. Apple releases their products - not as and when they finish making them but - to a pre-determined calendar.??Most of the automobile companies wait for Autocar events, which are at fixed times of the year, to unveil their new cars. When anything is done to a rhythmic schedule, we just adapt to it very naturally.

In our company, we run everything to a cadence. For example, all of us meet at a certain fixed time of the day and each of us take a micro goal for the next 24 hours and accomplish them unfailingly. Coders take a bug to fix or a single problem to solve, our analysts take one failed case to deep dive and present, founders take a target to take feedback from a client etc. Our working rhythm is our heartbeat. Initially these goals were small but as we gathered momentum, the product pipeline became robust, and the daily accomplishments became more and more powerful. And today cumulatively we achieve much more than what we did before. We are always a bit better this week than the last week.

If you are a founder or someone who manages a product development team, find a cadence for everything from releases, updates, and client interaction. Where you need to speed up a release, don’t throw a kitchen sink at the problem but instead improve the cadence. Let it just become the heartbeat of the team. Let it be the rhythm how the whole organization exhales toxic CO2 and absorbs fresh oxygen. Very soon you will find the roll is unstoppable.