Your Process is Your Product

Raise your hand if you love process? If you’re like most, you just felt the knee-jerk response to what most people really consider a process to be — overhead. For many, the very idea of a structured path conjures up drudgery — endless meetings, sign-offs, and TPS reports in service of pointy-haired managers. Given our intuitions, you’d think there is no value in organizing the chaos at all?

Yet, if we visited a beautiful factory, like the one where Leica cameras are made in Wetzlar, Germany, would marvel at the attention to detail. We’d drift wistfully between the pristine white rooms dotted with bold red accents. We’d appreciate this meticulous, mechanistic dance of creation, and at some level know it’s an essential ingredient to making great things.

Could the Leica M exist without this factory? Would there have been a Model T without the assembly line? Is there any way Tesla be where it is today without the sprawling Gigafactory? Are not these innovative achievements part and parcel with the instruments used to forge them?

“Your process is your product.” — Brian Norgard

In our effort to avoid overhead, we ignore something much worse than too much process — no process. If you’re operating in that world, don’t fool yourself. You’re not being artistic, you’re being arrogant.

A process is just a series of steps taken to achieve an end. Even without articulation or documentation, it’s still there. No process is still a process — it’s just opaque. As a member of a team, who must coordinate, this glib approach is inefficient, and worse, produces inconsistent, lower quality results.

It seems we need ‘just enough process’. The delicate balance between a process guiding what you do, and it becoming what you do. Finding equilibrium takes time, but if you care about your product, you should care as much about how you get there.

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