Life should be lived on the edge. You have to exercise rebellion: to refuse to tape yourself to rules, to refuse your own success, to refuse to repeat yourself, to see every day, every year, every idea as a true challenge - and then you are going to live your life on a tightrope. - Philippe Petit, Man on Wire

In 1974, Philippe Petit walked the 1,313 feet between the Twin Towers on a wire suspended a quarter mile above ground.

Petit’s daredevil feat is the subject of movies, documentaries, books and articles. He’s revered for his fearlessness, his intensity, his Herculean self-confidence and pioneering spirit.

His 45 minute performance was 6 years of practice and months of preparation in the making. The idea and courage, probably, required some incubation. Most of our biggest dreams do, too.

At the last company I worked for, I spent 6 months as a product manager.

Weekly sprints were exciting but frustrating: there was so much to do but so little time to do it.

I struggled with scope. How can I focus on such a small part of such a big thing without considering all of the possible ways the small thing will eventually fit into the big thing? How do you figure out all of the possible outcomes of each tiny decision?

Our CTO reassured me.

“You don’t.”

Agile product development is a series of well understood problems solved through a series of just in time decisions. You wait until the last responsible moment to make a decision that allows you to deliver the minimum viable product.

You write stories, develop and ship knowing that the small thing fits into the broader product vision, even if you aren’t sure exactly what will happen to the big thing next.

Keep it simple. Stay focused.

Often when you don’t identify a narrow enough scope, you try to solve problems before you really need to. Save the pipe dreams for the backlog. We could make this bigger, better, prettier, but do we need to today?

You also run the risk of trying to solve a problem that you don’t have enough information to understand let alone solve yet. You need more time. Solutions to poorly understood problems create more problems: features with a poor UX, technical debt, fixes for problems that don’t need to be solved. You waste time. The waterfall approach is dead for a reason.

In my first month, I went down rabbit holes of dependencies - possible future problems - and pipe dreams - what if we built this from the ground up?

Big is beautiful, but at its core, product development at the manager level is a story of cubic inches, understanding how high wide and long the box you’re working in is to deliver a finished feature that makes sense. One well thought out part of a 100 piece Ikea furniture assembly party.

The unstructured, amorphous product dreams that you talk about at the watercooler and during retrospectives are challenges for future you to grapple with. For now, one foot in front of the other.

In product management, every sprint is a high wire act with leadership, customer success, sales and customers watching. Interests are occasionally aligned, but usually not.

You can’t satisfy every stakeholder with every tightrope walk, so you’re going to have to perform a lot. Everytime you ship, you make sure each group gets enough of a show frequently enough to keep them coming back. You show up to walk every week but keep the tightrope short enough and close enough to the ground to conquer death while low-key dazzling those that watch on, and it’s enough.

As you grow and your team grows, the scope of what’s possible becomes bigger. You’re ready to work a little higher off the ground.

Even while you’re zoomed in, amorphous ideas rattle around in the back of your head. Something a coworker or a customer says in passing or an article you read takes you back down the rabbit hole for seconds or hours, getting a little closer to understanding the big dream well enough to keep moving towards fulfilling it.

Every epic is a series of sprints, and each sprint provides more shape and direction to the epic. Each sprint is tightly scoped with points assigned to each story, but the epic shrinks and expands, shifting week to week.

Phillipe Petit couldn’t afford to miss a detail or fail to foresee a potential issue. His life was on the line. Performing without prepping, practicing, proactively problem solving meant almost certain death. His dream had pragmatic issues.

To combat danger, he spent 6 years doing shorter tightrope walks, team development, and research.

Big ideas, audacious hairy goals, projects, dreams are often years in the making. Progress towards dreams will seem unclear. You will stall or even appear to stop. The work to get there will challenge you, wear you out, frustrate you, make you forget why you got started in the first place. Where the hell are you going?

We want our selves, team, company, family, whatever to be farther along, high wire act ready. We waste time worrying out loud about creating structure for a show that no one needs to see yet.

Structure is limiting because it makes you think that things have to happen a certain way. They don’t. They can’t.

Petite’s aim was simple. He wanted to reach for the clouds. As he practiced, he learned more, allowing his backlog to grow and then shrink as the epic reached its eventual conclusion.

The epic will change. Get started. Put one foot in front of the other. A cubic inch forward is progress. The time for your high wire act will come.

“It's impossible, that's for sure. So let's start working.” - Phillippe Petit, Man on Wire