How to play product tsundoku

Shiromani Kant

1. Quarterly objectives
2. Premature solutions
3. Product tsundoku ←

Product people sometimes play a game called product tsundoku, in which you collect feature ideas and let them pile up without implementing them. Product tsundoku derives from Japanese tsundoku, a similar game that you play with books you haven’t read.

How to play

To play product tsundoku, you need a steady source of product ideas. Vague ideas about how to improve the product, such as ongoing user experience improvements or fixing bugs won’t do. Nor will identifying customer problems: product tsundoku requires concrete feature ideas. In fact, in colloquial usage, the term tsundoku also refers to a feature backlog.

Gameplay consists of deriving as much satisfaction as possible from the feature backlog, without actually implementing the features. That way, ‘your’ features remain more perfect than they could ever actually become.

Using a software tool to glorify the feature backlog goes without saying. You can also schedule weekly ceremonies to keep it front-of-mind.

How to win

You cannot win a game of product tsundoku in the usual sense, because you cannot complete the game. However, some elements of competitive gameplay remain.

• One-upmanship – having a better tsundoku that other teams; see The Theory And Practice Of Gamesmanship; Or, The Art Of Winning Games Without Actually Cheating (1947)
• Over-promising – continually trolling the sales team by promising features, but never working on them. Include release dates to increase the stakes, especially in B2B SaaS.
• Strategy-avoidance – using the tsundoku to avoid talking about business goals, or a decision-framework for deciding which product development work will contribute to them (first person to say objective loses!)
• Assigning points – in an improvisational-comedy sub-game, reminiscent of Mornington Crescent, players assign so-called story points to features.

In general, you win at product tsundoku when other players think you have a more impressive product roadmap. In a company with more than one product, you can often compete against other product managers in a regular tournament, called a quarterly business review.

Causes

Product people play product tsundoku for various reasons, but principally because they enjoy fantasising that their customers need nothing more than more features. At the same time, actual software development only gets in the way, like rain that stops play in cricket or tennis, and never seems to end.

Features naturally accumulate, because you can imagine and describe a feature in far less time than it takes to build, especially if you skip customer research and user experience design. It also helps that you can write implausible user stories, instead of stories that real people might actually tell each other.

Counter-game

Planning any kind of quarterly objectives subverts the endless game of product tsundoku. Although you only complete product development by decommissioning the product, establishing a new focus for each new calendar quarter gives team members a sense of closure.

Avant garde product people reject product tsundoku, and play a counter-game called Objectives & Key Results (OKRs). Many people consider this completely unfair.