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Today, I came across a coment in the discussion on raising the competence of software product managers on the Business of Software forum, http://network.businessofsoftware.org/forum/topics/raising-competence-in-software?page=1&commentId=2352433%3AComment%3A9321&x=1#2352433Comment9321...
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Product managment has been around for a while...
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Into the Vertical
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Product Strategist: Go, Story Maps, and Emergence, Part 2
Cub Noozer
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I've been out of commission lately with the failure of my transformer connection to my laptop. The laptop could not receive any power. So much fun. That's over, so I'm back online. Then, the wifi crashed in the middle of the upload. Lost. So here at last....
In my last Product Strategist article, http://alturl.com/mf5, I described some strategies and tactics used in the game of Go, an oriental strategy game. The game is played by sketching out the areas you would like to keep and then successively filling in the details. A post on AgileProductDesign.com, "The new user story backlog is a map" at http://tinyurl.com/c3gk3c, described the use of a story map along the same line: implement the sketch and then the successive details in a breadth-first manner.
In this article, I'm going to walk you through a game five move pairs at a time, so you can see how the outcome emerges. Now, I'm just a 19 kyu player, and in this game isn't a game where I butcher the weaker player. Some players try to take the whole board. They are strong enough to do that. Ok, you're welcome. Sadly, they don't register or they change their usernames to hide. But, I play a lot of beginners, so it's important that they stay interested and motivated. The handicap feature helps with that. But, so does nudges and affirmations. The same sort of things you do when motivating people at work. You might Google for a game played by don ranked players. Their game play will be much more emergent than mine.
So on with the game. I’m playing black. White invited me. The site doesn’t let us switch sides.
Neither I nor my opponent had a handicap. My opponent has played me for a long time. With his stone in the middle, he chose to make the smallest move he could make. That both of us have played the handicap spots on our sides of the board, this is considered bad, greedy play. Mix it up more. Play on your opponent’s side of the board. At this point, our stones assert influence only, but we have sketched out our intentions.
Here my last move, as indicated by the stone in the blue square, is a knight's move of three, which has a slope of 1/3. A knight's move is stronger than a diagonal having a slope of one. They are stronger, because they are harder to cut. My last move balances influence and control. I gained two points. My opponent’s diagonal from center is weak, because the stones are too far apart and not supporting each other, and they constitute a diagonal with a slope of one. Strategically, I've played defense. This looks bad, but there was the Battle of the Bulge. He has no board balance in the area he has staked out.
The solid lines are said to have thickness, a term that indicates richer influence. Still, Go is a game of spreading, rather than connecting. You can be too dense. Denseness is an indication that you have played small successively.
My opponent has done a good job of pushing out into the center, not really a good thing. I have had to play defensively and thus played small, a bad thing as well. I do have good board balance on my side of the board except in the corners. His corners have much less influence than mine, but I can be attacked and killed back in the corners.
One of the reasons I worried about board balance was my intention to attack efficiently behind my opponent's lines. He put his forces forward to his front, as it were, so they could not also be in the rear. My attack has been successful, because it is large enough to live at this point. It is not, however, completely secured.
I continued to strengthen my attack in the corner. He has reacted to block my expansion. The corner still has vulnerabilities. And, I have played small, again, not so good. Still, you should be able to see that I have captures something more than the L’s worth of space. My corners are still weak.
My opponent has made a nice attack. I played reactively, which will cost me because his next move will force me to be dense, and preserve his connection to his territory. My response here is awful. It is reactive. I could have moved to connect to the edge, splitting his attack, or attacked his stone to the right of my stone on the second line. Further, he is now ready to attack my invasion in the top right corner. In the corner formation, I need to connect my left most stone to the edge, so I would reduce my vulnerability there to zero. Overall, my opponent has made more territory, and I have lost some.
My opponent made good progress to the edge. I let him take a stone, which then made him connect and become very solid. I firmly control the left top corner. Then, I went on to attack his bottom right corner. A stronger player would have killed my attacking formation. I’m not that good myself. Attempting to kill that corner tells you something about your opponent’s strength. Knight’s moves are just as informative. If they do a knight’s move of four, you are in trouble. Of course, they might do that by accident, but if they make it stick, then they are strong players.
Being able to read your opponents play is important just as CI is important to product managers. Even when I can attack and win, I’m playing too dense, not emergent enough, and not keeping the initiative. You want to own the game. You want to make the decisions your opponent reacts to, rather than reacting to their decisions. I have managed to gain full control of the side of the board that I sketched out in the first few moves of the game—strategy and execution.
My opponent will have to react defensively and densely to my last move.
My opponent did make his connecting move in response to my last move on the earlier board. That let me drive to the left and get large. I have made life there in the bottom right corner. At some point, however, I have lost the initiative, so my opponent is in control of the play. At this point, I have one this game, but it isn’t over yet.
Our endgame positions are fairly firm. My grasp on the upper-right corner is still at risk. You might even say that my opponent’s territory matches his expectations with his initial plunge into the center.
Our positions are further solidified. The details are being filled in. My last move to the edge in the bottom right is an endgame move. Leave the sealing off at the edges to the end of the game, but be awake to monkey jumps. My move loses initiative, because my opponent could wait until I advance to the next intersection up the board before stopping me, which lets him move anywhere on the board instead.
Both of us have firmed up the bottom-right corner. My last move drives into my opponent’s territory. The formation making the drive is connected enough. The drive need not be this dense.
I have extended into his territory. My intentions at this point are to cut his formation with a move immediately to the left of my last. He must respond reactively and connect. My last move was a little weak, but it is initiative keeping, so my next move will be to strengthen my hand there. My diagonal with a slope of one is weak, but I understand that any move by my opponent must be countered with a connection on my part, or my formation will be cut. I am not trying to make territory. I am reducing his territory.
My opponent made is defensive connection, and an attempt to split my formation along that diagonal with a slope of one. I played dense to keep my formation connected.
Here my opponent has limited my ability to incur into his territory further. And, I have connected my incurring formation to the main territory making some territory while I did this. Notice that in the bottom-right corner, I did not make my defensive connection when he moved to the right edge. My top-right formation is still at risk.
My last move here and my last move on the previous board were both small moves. Bad. Notice that my opponent took my stone in the bottom-right corner. I cannot block his further incursion there. My opponent attacked inside my line at center left. I was able to easily restrict his growth, so that three-stone formation is dead. You do not have to take capture stones. They are yours if, at the end of the game, they had not made life. Restricting his growth eliminated that formations ability to make life.
My opponent attacked my top-right corner. My last move here is wrong. So congrats to my opponent, he succeeded in killing my corner, because of my trading off a one point gain via weak play connecting my incurring formation to the main body in the lower left against a huge loss in the upper right. Dah! Reactive is a loser. Step back. Always count your liberties. Always make the largest move, a rule that I have not followed in this game. Liberties are the free unoccupied intersections adjacent to stones and formations. When there are no liberties and no eyes, you die.
My opponent’s move to the left of the corner stone, in the top right, is enough to kill the corner stone. I should have taken his stone. An alternative would have been to connect the corner stone to the formation by moving to the intersection below the corner stone. That would have been a winner as well. Unfortunately, once the corner stone was taken, the three stones below the open intersection below the corner stone were vulnerable as well. The Ko Rule prevents me from just taking the attacker’s stone. The Ko Rule prevents repeating positions. You must move elsewhere before retaking a position. It’s usually too late by then. Do today what must be done today. The whole thing was a house of cards that just sat there waiting. My reactive play didn’t help. This game was played asynchronously, as in a move a day. And, I had about a hundred games going. Ah, excuses. How many do we have? Why do we need them? Yeah, it was me, me being reactive and quick. Slow down, get proactive. Make the largest move. And, no losing a stone or two is not the end of the world. Losing an island is another matter.
My opponent has gone on to kill the upper-right formation. This changed the balance of the game. I’m making a connection and attempting to make territory at my territory-reducing incursion.
My opponent prevented me from making an eye in my territory-reducing incursion, and he made another attack behind my lines. The questions you have to ask before making such an attack are what am I attempting to cut, or can I make life. Neither was operative in his move.
He has made additional attempts to attack behind my lines. I responded by limiting his growth, which in turn kills those formations. The point of having influence and control is the ease of defending the area by either preventing cuts or preventing life. Always think cuts first. If you can be cut, take care of that first. My last move connects and limits.
The game has ended. A game ends when both players pass. You pass when you cannot make another productive move. If this was a hand scored game, the area on the board that appears in the original background color would need to be filled, as it is disputed, but resolution of the dispute does not change the score at all. I lost this game. The software scoring this game tinted the background of the board to indicate who controls what area, and what dead stones were removed at the end of the game.
The area was 94 to 105. Black has a 6.5 point advantage for starting first. This advantage is removed from the score at the end of the game, as are captured stones. In Japanese scoring, captured stones are ignored and do not change the score. The final score is 75.5 to 82. My opponent won by 6.5 points, not enough to earn me a handicap.
In a game this close, losing the top-right corner turned the tide of the game. Reactive play on my part caused that loss. As a product manager, you cannot afford to play a reactive game. How close are your games, your competitors?
Once more, but strategically only
As you scan across these boards, notice how areas were sketched out early in the game, and were realized as the details were successively filled in. In a story map, you would work breadth first. In Go, you are not supposed to make successive moves in the same area of the board. You are supposed to progress in three or four local conflicts simultaneously. Or, you are supposed to play in a breadth first manner and mature your positions across the board throughout the game. My bad. Writing this article might improve my game. Agilists review their iterations and releases to improve their game as well. The military do these reviews after action reviews after every exercise. They provide a platform for learning and teaching. A product manager could use them to teach their programmers what they mean, so there are less misunderstandings in the future.
The last thumbnail on the figure shows the intentions telegraphed in the first snapshot of the game vs. the outcomes. The light brown line showed how much was lost for so little. That kind of multiplier is effectively a strategic issue. It is a strategic issue for a product manager to be in reactive mode. Product managers should become proactive as soon as possible and stay in a proactive stance as much as possible. Playing small, or solving quickly indicate reactive play. Stop that!
The Takeaways
The larger point of this article is the sketch and refine down to the details approach advocated by the story map approach. This successive refinement approach works. It can work in a depth-first or breadth-first approach. The breadth-first approach scans alternatives. The breadth-first approach is strategic. The depth-first approach consumes resources for the tactical purposes of certainty.
The breadth-first approach delays certainty. The depth-first approach, my guess would be, results in more refactoring. A portfolio management approach advocated in “Software by Numbers,” xx, as an extension of feature-driven design (FDD), an agile approach, which delivers value around minimal packages of marketable functionality, would tend to be more tactical with early value delivery being the strategy served. So the selection of breadth-first or depth-first means might be out of the product manager’s hands. Regardless, prefer proactivity.
Then, there is the hints about the daily do, always make the largest move. The largest move will be the proactive move. The largest move will exploit and magnify influence and thickness. The largest move wins more than the smallest move.
Go is a strange game. The times when I beat a 5 kyu opponent, I won, because they didn’t respect me. That this happened more than once with the same guy was amazing. The competitor that looks weak may just be bluffing. A feature might be bait.
The intersections on a Go board can be interpreted as features or customers. Do customers surround features, or are features surrounded by customers? Which is the bait, and which is the fish?
Go is won or lost by a single point. Software vendors must win by more than one point. The oligarch’s generally win by something more along the lines of 74% vs. everyone else’s 26%. Still, when you sell a custom application gig to an early adopter, you win by one point. When you play in the vertical market, you win by less than you would need in the horizontal market, way less. When you enter the horizontal market, control eight verticals and convert them into eight fronts that grow together and support each other as you enter.
In Go, the initiative shifts throughout the game. You need an inventory of moves that will force your opponent to react. When you run out of this inventory, your opponent will get the initiative. Among competing software companies, your opponent can always find a way to gain the initiative, and you can always get it back. Even keeping it, doesn’t prevent your competitors from gaining some. Real life is much more dimensional that the game of Go. Even a feature, which can be fast followed, can have more depth than the fast follower can see. That depth lets you keep the initiative.
Talk back! Leave a comment. Or, for those of you out on an RSS feed, email comments to locke.david@rocketmail.com. Or, tweet me at @DavidWLocke
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