(2015-12-29) Maurya How To Achieve Breakthrough By Embracing Constraints

Ash Maurya: How to Achieve Breakthrough by Embracing Constraints. In its early days, Southwest Airlines had to sell one of their planes or face bankruptcy

They found a way for achieving their goal of keeping their existing routes with three planes instead of four planes. They did this, not by brute-forcing, but embracing their constraint. Here’s how.

They noticed that the average gate turnaround time for their planes was about 60 minutes.

They calculated that if they could shrink their gate turnaround time from 60 minutes to 10 minutes, they would be able to fly all their current routes with one less plane. Further analysis showed that the passenger boarding process was the biggest contributor to this gate turnaround time. They took on the challenge and introduced a radical new boarding process with no assigned seating

But they didn't stop there. They continued to optimize for gate turnaround times even further – ironically, by imposing additional constraints upon themselves

They also only started offering economy seats and no inflight meals

Rather than viewing these constraints as limitations, Southwest Airlines turned them into a differentiated positioning statement: "We are the only short haul, low fare, high frequency, point-to-point carrier in the U.S.".

From a systems perspective, however, constraints are gifts. Every system always has one and correctly identifying that single constraint holds the key to practicing "right action, right time". The biggest results come from just a few key actions (bottleneck)

*One final example.

How do you build what people want without a product?*

The number one reason why new products fail is not a failure to build what we set out to build, but a failure to find the right customers and markets for our products.

Customer don't care about your solution but your offer. Build that instead. You don't need lots of time, money, or people to test an offer.

And no this approach isn't just limited to high-tech or software products. It is just as applicable to no-tech, services, and hardware products. To put this last statement to test, I began running online bootcamps four times a year with a diverse range of teams from all over the world

Early-traction can be achieved in ~8 weeks