Builder and Gardener Mindsetsthree days beforeMy dear friend Alex Komoroske did a podcast episode recently on all…Loops: dead or alive

July 31, 2022 · 4 min read

Customer-vendor loops and their setting2022The notion of a setting for a customer-vendor loop is fairly intuitive.…Customer-Vendor Loop2022I’ve been sketching a bunch of compounding loops this week, and wondering…There are two important shifts to consider when examining a setting. The first is the shift in my needs. Over time, as my customer-vendor loop develops, I will find that the choices I made early on are no longer as useful as they were. For example, I may want to continue accelerating my capacity to build a Product, and the tools of the setting that I started with have hit their limit. In such a situation, I will want to examine alternatives for these tools and rethink my choices. I will want to change my setting.

Change2022So far, I carefully avoided the topic of change, presenting my problem-solving…The second shift is in the setting itself. Time also influences the setting itself. The ecosystem I may have chosen for its torrent of Customers may suddenly dry up to a tiny trickle, necessitating a search for another source. This one can feel a bit more challenging, because it has an appearance of kind of happening to me, rather than me making the choices.

Becoming a setting2022I’ve been geeking out about this fascinating phenomenon when parts of one…Finding the setting2022In the previous story, I talked at length about finding the setting,…Both of these shifts illustrate that settings change, whether through our actions or by themselves. To accommodate these changes and persist, every customer-vendor loop needs a bit of slack built into its stocks. Put differently, for a customer-vendor loop to be sustainable, it needs a capacity to grow. Applying a bit more nuance on it, the loop does not need to always grow. It just needs a capacity to do so. A customer-vendor loop that’s deep into its asymptotes is a dead loop. Dead loops are structurally unsound, because they no longer have room to change. Some dead loops can survive for a while, because they still produce value even after they can no longer fit the setting. However, they are a “dead loop walking” – their demise is predetermined.

Asymptote analysis using customer-vendor loop2022Another potentially useful source of insights is using the customer-vendor loop for…Making sense of SWOT with customer-vendor loops2022When brainstorming entries for a SWOT analysis, it might be useful to…This may sound a bit abstract, so let me reach for a more concrete scenario. Imagine a sub-team that was organized around a particular feature of some larger app. Maybe it’s a button that does something interesting when you click it. If we draw a customer-vendor loop for this team, we will notice that its Customers stock has a strong asymptote. It’s bound to some percentage of Customers that use the app – which makes sense: to click the button, the users will first have to get into the app. Similarly, the value of the Interaction of this loop is strongly tied to its expected usefulness within the app. The feature is boxed in by asymptotes.

Stages of the customer-vendor loop2022One other thing that seems useful is the idea that the feedback…In this scenario, the sub-team will happily climb the developmental stages of the loop, and run straight into the walls of the box. Once the feature reaches some plausible number of app Customers who click the button, the sub-team will quickly turn into a dead loop: the feature is still popular, and still needed by the app, but there’s little reason to improve it. A common side effect here is that the feature’s active development stops and the loop is abandoned. One by one, the members of the team move on to more interesting projects, with one burned out, yet still duty-bound maintainer left fixing bugs, grimly holding the dead loop of the original team in their grip.

Micro and macro jank2021If our team’s OODA loop runs just a tiny bit slower than…The compounding effects of OODA2021The aversion cycle is the shortest and most brutal of the three.…The Plumber Age2022This framing jumped out of a conversation with the fellow FLUX-ers and…

Limits2022This story builds on the one I wrote a while ago, and…An alternative ending to this story is the dead loop avoidance tactic, where the product lead of the team keenly avoids the deadness by steering toward new fronteers, defying the confines of the asymptote. What if instead of just users clicking on this button, we could also play a small video? What if we opened a tiny window that allowed the user to customize their preferences for how to use the feature? What if we made the button larger, or perhaps more colorful?

The OODA inside2021Because of the way we humans are wired, the expectation gradient is…This creativity may seem wonderful, but because it plays out within the larger setting of an app, it may suddenly stop being an integral part of the overall app experience and instead start jostling with other features for user’s attention. If you’ve ever participated in an app experience that comes across as an incoherent mess of features, each seemingly operating within its own bubble, you have observed the effect of dead loop avoidance. If you’ve ever wondered why a particular app feature hasn’t improved in years, you’ve observed the effect of the dead loop abandonment.

Separating cargo from the train2023I’ve been puzzling over a problem that many engineering teams face and…How to get trappedthe day afterSo you want to add more suffering to your life and build…At the core of these sad stories is a rule of thumb that’s worth repeating: to be sustainable, a customer-vendor loop must have room to grow. A team that’s organized to ride such a loop must have – and will keep seeking – flexibility to choose and change its setting.