Who Is Your Direct Object?

As kids, my sister and I devoured Saturday morning cartoons: Looney Tunes, The Jetsons, The Pink Panther, Grape Ape, Popeye. We used the commercials for snacks and bathroom breaks except when a “commercial” was an installment of Schoolhouse Rock! In these cases, we stayed parked on the shag carpet. Schoolhouse Rock! were animated shorts that taught us about civics, grammar, math, and history. Each installment featured characters in compelling storylines set to groovy 70’s soundtracks. The characters and music stuck in our heads so we retained the information: “Conjunction junction, what’s your function?”

One installment covered transitive and intransitive verbs–those with and without direct objects.

“Find that subject. Where’s the action?

Verbs can make a subject sing.

Take a subject.

What is it?

What’s done to it?

What does it say?”

At the time, I couldn’t explain the rhetorical implications of transition. I understood that verbs expressed action and, most importantly, how actions affected objects and people.??

I recalled the “Verb That’s What’s Happening” episode during a recent product roadmap session. The program manager opened the meeting: “We need to release by August 30th, before end-of-quarter. In this workshop, we’ll plan backward from the release date and define our interim milestones.”

We dutifully populated the template with dates, estimated variances, and dependencies. Business and development heads negotiated scope to deliver as much value by August 30 within the defined budget. As the exercise proceeded, I composed a new verse for the Verb jingle in my head:

“Release to whom?

For what benefit?

By what process?

Who determines success?”

We release our products to a marketplace of users. These users pay us for the product if it increases their productivity and/or reduces their toil. Despite these market realities, the users to whom our product offered value made no appearance in our discussion. Our roadmap exercise suggested that releasing a product was an intransitive process, lacking a direct object.

To Whom Do We Deliver?

After a lunch break, with the release roadmap largely complete, we debated adding columns to the template to answer the questions from my impromptu jingle. Some team members argued these data were ancillary to a roadmap and would bloat the document. Others countered that customer constraints would influence the schedule and therefore we should document them as early in the cycle as possible. Omitting the customer-centric data produced an idealistic schedule rather than an actionable one, as seen from our customers’ perspectives.

Debate concluded when an executive interjected: “We need to obsess about our customers. We want zero distance between our product teams and their customers.” With that statement as our charter, we populated the new columns. Including customers in our process encouraged our customer-facing colleagues to share insights regarding user acceptance testing periods, deployment blackout periods, and planned vacations of key personnel at customer sites.?

As some team members had argued, the document became more complex as a result of centering the exercise around customers. We raised questions that we could not answer without talking to customers. Various people took action items to engage their contacts and report their findings back to the group before we declared the roadmap complete.

The By-Products of Customer Engagement

I contacted a customer in my region and asked if they had other product deployments scheduled coincident with our planned rollout. She responded immediately with details and included this feedback: “Thanks for including us in your deployment planning. Most vendors deliver their roadmaps as a fait accompli that we’re supposed to accept without question.” Her response validated for me the incremental work we had undertaken to create a customer-centric roadmap. The extra work also reduced the time we spent in back-and-forth negotiation with customers and in updating the roadmap. We had taken an important step toward establishing a trust relationship with our customers.?

Although Schoolhouse Rock! didn’t aim to espouse best practices for project management or customer relations, it offered a broadly applicable maxim: “See the object [of our work].” Then engage our direct object(s) to confirm they share our definition of value and that our delivery process suits their needs and respects their constraints.