Summary
When teams don’t know how to pivot, the resulting waste can lead to a slow down in product delivery. Unfortunately, such confusion occurs commonly in UX/Product teams where roles can blur, and overlap between responsibilities can be rampant. In this session, product expert Adam Thomas introduces the concept of “Survival Metrics” — an approach to team collaboration that not only encourages healthy pivots, but puts in place the mechanisms to achieve them. Stick around to join the conversation and ask Adam your questions during our post-session Q+A, moderated by Christian Crumlish.
Key Insights
-
•
60 to 90% of product ideas fail to improve their intended metrics, illustrating the need to stop defaulting to 'go'.
-
•
Good strategy involves clear diagnosis, guiding policy with identity, and coherent action to address challenges effectively.
-
•
Repeated incongruence—leveraging competing incentives—helps teams adjust strategies by surfacing disagreements and truth.
-
•
Building political safety through trust—recognizing excellence, inducing stress, sharing info, and showing vulnerability—is key for decisions.
-
•
Data-informed decision making balances qualitative insight and quantitative data, avoiding data-driven pitfalls like the Challenger disaster.
-
•
Survival metrics are time-bound, contextualized, and tied to decision points, enabling teams to stop, pivot, or invest as needed.
-
•
Avoid sunk cost fallacy by cultivating repetition and muscle for re-diagnosis, adjusting guiding policies, and coherent actions.
-
•
Feature roadmaps and strict delivery dates erode trust due to noise buildup; decision journals and retrospectives improve transparency.
-
•
Anti-fragile organizations benefit from stress and shocks by avoiding technical, UX, and political debt through early small stress tests.
-
•
Storytelling frameworks like ABT (And, But, Therefore) enhance communication by framing strategy around problems, actions, and villains.
Notable Quotes
"60 to 90% of our ideas do not improve the metrics they were intended to improve."
"A good strategy honestly acknowledges the challenges being faced and provides an approach to overcoming them."
"Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth, but a plan is an anchor for pivoting and changing direction."
"Feature roadmaps are bad because coherent actions start to become noise over time in complex environments."
"Being data informed is not being data driven; the Challenger exploded because people wanted more data but ignored qualified gut."
"We want to trust the data that comes in but we do not necessarily care who gives it to us — privacy over secrecy."
"Stop means a bright line is crossed, so there is no wiggle room; pivot means iterating based on new information."
"Burn down theater is when a team shows ticket progress but has made no real decisions in months."
"Antifragility is creating an organization that benefits from shocks, randomness, disorder, and stressors."
"We live in organizations like organisms; find analogies that your company understands and build your communication around them."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Doctors hate using EHRs because it turns them into clerks, interacting more with machines than patients."
Standardizing Product Merits for Leaders, Designers, and Everyone
June 15, 2018
"I realized I was just making it up despite the company’s growth."
Simon WardleyMaps and Topographical Intelligence (Videoconference)
January 31, 2019
"We can’t solve systemic problems with surface-level solutions or checklists."
Sandra CamachoCreating More Bias-Proof Designs
January 22, 2025
"I held Jeff accountable by expecting criticism to come with rationale and intentional improvement."
Darian DavisLessons from a Toxic Work Relationship
January 8, 2024
"Providing more holistic recommendations helped us gain more trust and buy-in from stakeholders, increasing UX maturity."
Fisayo Osilaja[Demo] The AI edge: From researcher to strategist
June 4, 2024
"Empowering maker culture invites everyone to be part of a collective endeavor far beyond any individual."
Uday GajendarThe Wicked Craft of Enterprise UX
May 13, 2015
"Relying on a single content strategist was a strategic mistake that created a single point of failure."
Davis Neable Guy SegalHow to Drive a Design Project When you Don’t Have a Design Team
June 10, 2021
"TripAdvisor is really nine major business units each thinking like sub companies instead of one end-to-end user experience."
Eniola OluwoleLessons From the DesignOps Journey of the World's Largest Travel Site
October 24, 2019
"Finding a single source of truth for design documents and artifacts is extremely hard because most tools operate in silos."
Aurobinda Pradhan Shashank DeshpandeIntroduction to Collaborative DesignOps using Cubyts
September 9, 2022
