Scaling Creativity: The Power of Roadrunner & Guiding Principles
Early on, when your team is small (whether product, design, marketing, fill in the blank), innovation and creativity flows naturally. Then the laws of scale start to come in to play: your company gets bigger, hires people to focus on more narrow (but deeper) feature sets. The product begins to take on a life of it’s own, building in new features and enhancements at a pace which your small team could have only dreamt. Now you’re stuck answering a question that once felt so obvious: What do we build next?
Many articles have been written about how to prioritize the features which your team should build next, but how you answer the upstream problem of ensuring that the features entering into your prioritization are marching to the beat of the same drum is a key leadership challenge.
Enter: The Roadrunner and Wile E Coyote, purveyors of ACME goods.
A few weeks ago, Hunter Walk posted an excerpt from the autobiography of Roadrunner’s creator (founder?), Chuck Jones. This excerpt highlighted the 9 rules/guiding principles that drove all 50 episodes of the classic “Wile E Coyote and The Road Runner” that are a perfect testament to how creativity can be stimulated while being guided from which all product leaders can learn.
The beauty of these rules is that when you read them, you can almost see the episodes in your mind — even though it may have been years since you last watched one. These were the creative parameters within which the Roadrunner product had to live. Whether you were a storyboard writer or animator — you knew you had to operate within these boundaries.
The same boundaries guide the most effective product and company development. These principles exist in nearly every company, it just varies whether they are explicit or implicit. They also come in different flavors: user experience / design principles (at Pandora, we never keep you more than one tap away from the music), organizational principles (always have the fewest number of people needed in a meeting), and even company principles (don’t be evil).
Some companies, like Google, make these principles public. Others teach them in employee on-boarding and reinforce them with posters across the office. Whether you make them public or keep them close to the vest, they are the key to scale and picturing a product that doesn’t exist yet.
These principles almost always begin implicitly, and that’s ok. But as your team grows and you begin to teach people “how we do things here,” making your principles explicit not only speeds up your onboarding, but rather begins to centralize your team around the same boundaries.
In our product team meeting a few weeks ago, we read through Chuck’s rules and felt the power they drove. It reinvigorated our drive toward making sure our principles (we opt to keep most internal at Pandora) were up to date and set to guide us into our next phase of scale, in which we want to triple our output without tripling the size of our team. If you haven’t done it lately on your team: I highly recommend the exercise.
This story is published in Noteworthy, where 10,000+ readers come every day to learn about the people & ideas shaping the products we love.
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