Scale Friendly VS. Innovation Friendly
When Cam and I decided to leave San Francisco to be closer to my mom in Canada I knew that we were taking a risk. For a long time, I lived my life in a scale friendly way, which included writing a plan, raising money to do that plan, building (getting that job and promotion), and then saving money for the future and then finally I re-evaluated last year and realized that a lot of what I was doing and the way that I was living my life had no value to me.
I took a chance, quit my job and relocated to Canada with Cam. We had eight humongous luggages with us to start our new life. Thank you Uber! I remember seeing a senior couple 5am in the airport who came up to us to ask, “What are you guys up to? Moving today?” and Cam said, “Yup! We are moving out of here to start something new”. He replied with, “I wish I did that back in the day! Good luck!”
I know that we needed more than luck. Years of working in agile in SF taught me a lot about innovation friendly practices, which is why a lot of how we are living now is an experiment. We are continuing to test to see if our new life meets our values. So the basis of innovation friendly practices, based on agile is:
1. Asking why; why is this person or something currently doing this?
We moved back to Canada because we wanted to be closer to family, spend more time together as a couple and with my family.
2. Then ask to surface values: Why is this person or something doing this? Usually people do something in a way because there is something that is valuable to them. People usually don’t do something that doesn’t work. Discover why they are doing that thing rather than how.
Living in the city; we spent a lot of time commuting and I really enjoy the time that Cam and I got to spend together. It would be nice to be able to do that as a newlywed as well.
Living away from my mom for seven years I just miss her. I hope that living in the same place will give us more time to spend together and enjoy our life!
I also want to live in a place where we can buy a home. Living in the city the houses were close to a million dollars.
3. Create a simple prototype - test it out see it works (duct tape); and if it’s true.
We moved to Kelowna with only things that we needed. We wanted to start off fresh. We sold everything else in the city and gave away a lot to our friends.
Living in a small town we are getting a lot more time to spend together because it’s no longer taking three hours to commute to work.
We are also spending a lot more time together as a family
We are also living in a place where we can buy a home where the average price of a home is about $500,000 CAD. Much more achievable!
4. Then we build a product around that’s really tightly defined what was important
We continue to build our live here with my new design business and taking on a new full time position in January. So, we continue to add concrete plans around what’s important and valuable.
5. We scale this up - we are constantly looking to see if it is valuable to the user or not
This honestly is anything from taking a job to purchasing more expensive items for our home. We started off with a lot of second hand items and now we are slowly adding more higher quality items.
We continue to evaluate by talking a lot as a family. Is what we’re doing valuable to us? And the more that we do this, I notice we gradually reveal and develop what we value more as a family together.