43 architecturalist papers: p-zero or die.

[so I tweaked an earlier post to be more inclusive and more relevant]

VMware has – possibly – the coolest skunkworks system at any company. Skunkworks projects are shared at a three-day internal conference known as RADIO.

During the year, employees across the company work on projects and produce papers based on those projects whose only purpose is to share them at RADIO and possibly get funded later.

Andrew Lambeth is a Fellow and all-around amazing person who gave an excellent talk titled P-zero or die. The point of the talk was how to take any big idea that you had and get it funded.

What does P-zero mean? Well, the P means priority. Everything in a company has a priority to decide what the team works on first, and the number zero is the highest priority level.  Why zero? Because, well, it turns out, first you start with the most important things having priority 1. And then the teams realize that there are too many P1’s. So instead of moving everything down to P2, a new priority level is created, priority zero. And then, of course, there are too many priority zero’s, and someone says, “let’s create p -1”. Then everyone realizes how many scripts and tools will break and that this makes them look ridiculous. So the org finally does the hard work to figure out how to reprioritize. But why didn’t this happen when p-zero was created? Well, because computer scientists start counting at 0, not 1. So 0 is the lowest number, not 1.

The fundamental principle of the talk is that if you don’t make your big idea a p0, it will get deprioritized for other stuff. And the reason it got deprioritized is that it’s big, and its value proposition was unclear, and people didn’t understand what you were trying to accomplish.

And so here’s the checklist of things you need to do to make your big idea someone else’s p0.

1. 1. Describe it effectively in 5 minutes.
   2. Success is easy to measure.
   3. Listeners must understand, not agree.
   4. Have a document to share, not go over.
   5. Describe it on any media.
   6.  Pitch it at every opportunity, relentlessly.

And the most crucial thing is this:

7. If you get no traction, then move on to the next big idea.

Sometimes a big idea’s time has not come, and you just need to let it go.

I liked the talk so much that I decided to make a t-shirt.