Product Reflections from my last Saturday run

I finished a 5k on Saturday morning in 35 minutes and 15 seconds, despite recent runs coming in around 38 minutes. What did I do differently?

It was a decision I made in the first kilometre about where to spend the effort, and then readjusted at every kilometre after it.

I’ve been running this 5k for a couple of years. My personal best is 32 minutes, and somewhere in the back of my head sits the ambition of going under 30. Inconsistency had pushed me out to 38, which is where I was starting from on Saturday.

The arithmetic that didn’t help

Early in the first kilometre my watch showed 7 minutes 10 seconds per kilometre. To fix my run, all I needed was five kilometres at 6 minutes each. That gets me to 30.

Except I was in no shape to hold 6 minutes per kilometre for five kilometres. The first three kilometres are reasonably flat with some descent. The last two climb. I’m slower on that section every time, partly because of the gradient and partly because I’m tired by the time I reach it.

Banking time on the flat

So I set myself a smaller goal: run one or two kilometres at 6 minutes per kilometre. I stopped thinking about 30 and put my effort into the kilometre in front of me. If it worked, I’d come in somewhere around 34.

I ran the first kilometre at around 7:10, then adjusted and held the next two at 6:09. Not the 6 minutes I’d aimed for, but close enough to bank a useful amount of time. The fourth kilometre slowed as the ground started to rise. The last one took me close to eight minutes, which is roughly what I expected.

That’s how 35:15 happened. I’d wanted 34, so on the ambitious goal I fell short. But the ambitious number set the pace early, and the realistic one told me at the end that this had been a good Saturday rather than a failure.

Where this meets product delivery

I’ve coached a lot of teams through quarterly goal setting with their stakeholders. It’s still one of the more reliable ways I know to create focus when everyone wants something different. Quarterly goals give you a way to measure progress towards the strategic goals that sit a year or more out. Short-term goals, weekly or fortnightly, create the immediate focus that makes the quarterly ones reachable.

Product delivery rarely offers teams what I had on my run: a trail I’ve been down multiple times. The work is more complex than that, and too many of the factors can’t be predetermined. This is where the tactical goals come in. They chart a path towards the quarterly goal, and as each one is met the team can plan the next period with information it didn’t have before, and with more confidence in its ability to deliver.

The muscle for balancing realistic short-term goals against bold longer-term ones takes time to build, and I don’t think you build it by reading about it. Start somewhere, learn what works in your context, and expect to miss some of what you aimed for.

You won’t always land the long-term goal. You’ll be further along than you would have been without them, and you’ll know where you stand well before the end, which is the part that lets you do something about it.

I’d be interested to know what the last short cycle told your team, and whether anything changed because of it.

Credit: Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash

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