In my previous post, I mentioned Kent Beck's (@kentbeck.com) new Still Burning series. There is another line from that first episode that I keep coming back to:

You can implement anything, but you can't implement everything.

Kent goes on to say that "the skill of picking which ones to explore, that suddenly has much more leverage…"

We have had relatives of this thought around for a long time — "the most important word for a product manager is 'no'." The old framing: software development is slow, so pick your bets carefully because you can only build a few things. The new framing: software development is fast, so pick your bets carefully because you can build almost anything.

The interesting word is explore. It echoes Lean thinking: what is the cheapest, fastest way to validate or invalidate an idea? And here there is a real shift.

Building software has gotten dramatically cheaper. But many of the other forms of validation have not fallen in cost nearly as quickly. Recruiting five people for an in-depth user research session — and actually running it — is still likely hours of work. The prep and synthesis may be faster now, but the core activity remains stubbornly human.

In other words: the cost of building has fallen faster than the cost of many other forms of exploration.

So, rationally, we should expect more exploration through building.

“Just build the thing” used to be expensive advice. Increasingly, it is simply a reasonable way to learn.