Nearly an hour and a half.
That's how long I sat with a client's product team today while they asked, in a dozen different ways, one question.
"But what's possible?"
Sharp people, a real problem, and every one of them waiting for us to draw the box so they could start thinking inside it.
There is no box anymore.
What was missing wasn't feasibility, it was vision. And that's not their fault.
We trained them.
For years we've kept Pavlov's dog in Schrödinger's box. Every idea was both possible and impossible until an engineer opened the lid, and over time the dog learned to drool at the sound of the lid instead of the food.
So now people bring us half an idea and wait for us to open the box and tell them whether it's alive.
To be fair, the bell was real. For years, building software was expensive and slow.
Someone from sales had an idea, and we rang the bell.
Ding. "That's three sprints."
Product wanted something bold.
Ding. "The data model doesn't support that."
Customer success asked for a small tweak.
Ding. "Not this quarter."
And so the quarterly prioritisation meeting was born, where every department turns up with its best puppy eyes, tail wagging, hoping engineering will throw their idea a bone.
We weren't being difficult. We were being honest.
But honesty, repeated often enough, turns into training. People learned to bring us smaller ideas, then half ideas, and eventually just the question: "What's possible?"
You know what's changed.
The bell is broken. Three sprints is now a Tuesday afternoon.
And yet here we are, still in the circus, with the elephant in the room tied to a stake it could pull out without noticing.
Yesterday I posted the receipts for No Excuse. If the tech debt meeting no longer makes sense, the puppy-eyes prioritisation meeting is next in line.
The scarce thing isn't engineering time anymore. It's knowing what's worth building.
So product teams have lost their excuse too. Not to build everything, but to turn up with nothing.
"What's possible?" used to be a fair question. Now it's a way of dodging the hard part.
If the build takes an afternoon, showing up without a vision is the only thing left that's slowing us down.
No excuse.
So whose job is it to untie the elephant? Ours. We did the conditioning, so we get to undo it.
Next time someone asks "what's possible?", don't answer. Ask back.
What would you build if the answer were "anything"?
What does success look like in six months?
Who reads the report this decision ends up in, and what do they do with it?
It'll feel awkward at first. Expect blank stares, maybe even a little whimpering. But keep asking until the conversation is about where we're going, not what we're allowed to do.
Stop ringing the bell.
Open the box.
Pull up the stake.
