Challenge #4: Kill Obvious Before It Kills You

You know those few features you settled on?

Now it's time for you to take those 3-5 crucial, v1 features and break them into bite-sized actions.

Warning: Do NOT skip this step! Even if what you need to do is super obvious. (Yes, I've heard it all before. And said it, too. And experienced the doom.) Trust me:

The most dangerous work is unclear or unspoken work.

That's why your goal for today is to chop up your project into explicit little bite-sized actions. Not pieces. Not features. Not finished widgets you can slot together. Not things.

You need ACTIONS! aka things you can actually DO.

You want to start at the end (heyyyy!) and work backwards (JFS Principle #3)… bit by bit, bite by bite (JFS Principle #6).

For that you need a Backwards Plan. Which is what you learned about in Lesson #4.

Here's a (whimsical) example of a backwards plan that made be made by an ambitious young doctor named Frankenstein:

The body, obviously, is the destination. Frankenstein starts with "Create body" and then works backwards from there to find out what came before (assemble parts) and what came before that (acquire parts, learn to sew, etc).

But the body is not the only destination. It's just feature #1.

To animate a body, he's got to have a body — but he's also gotta have some help. So feature #2 on the good doctor's Backwards Plan would look something like this:

And, naturally, he's got to have a way to animate the body… with his new henchman's help. So that would be feature #3. (Which I'm keeping under wraps (trade secrets, you know).)

Remember how you learned it's so crucial to break things into features, and no more than 3-5? This is why.

Now, I used such a whimsical and slightly gruesome metaphor to help you get distance from your work, which seems ever so much more normal and obvious. That deadly, deadly word.

Obvious is so close to "oblivious." Remember that!

Lesson #4 contained the instructions you need to create your Backwards Plan.

And now, your challenge #4 is to implement those instructions… with the help of this handy-dandy cheat sheet.

Grab it, print it, use it:

Make your work easy to understand and easy to do… and avoid the deadly quicksand of "obvious."

Your next lesson drops Monday.

Amy

Did you get this lesson from a friend?

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Here's what comes next

• WEEK 1 — Start at the End, Design Your Destination
• WEEK 2 — Cut Without Remorse, Break It Into Bites
• WEEK 3 — How Do You Stay Motivated?, Finish Something Microscopic
• WEEK 4 — The Myth of the Big Win, Creating the Little Win Habit
• WEEK 5 — The Life Changing Magic of Shipping 1 & 2
• WEEK 6 — Myth of the Big Launch, The Fear of Shipping
• BONUS WEEK 7 — You Shipped! Now what?