Method: The 3 Bricklayers and the 666 Roadmap
How planning around three time horizons can help you find product-market fit and create transformative learning.
Do you find yourself constantly planning or trying to find the right sense of direction?
When you’re building something new, that you want to create a long term impact, there’s three different time horizons that are useful to consider.
These are brought to life by the parable of The Three Bricklayers.
The story goes that someone walks past a building site and asks the workmen “what are you doing?”
The first replied, “I’m laying bricks.”
The second replied, “I’m building a wall.”
And the third replied, “I’m creating a cathedral.”
One is focused on the task at hand.
One is focused on the outcome.
One the purpose behind the work.
All three of these perspectives are necessary to build a cathedral.
Deliberately organising around them is also helpful for creating transformative learning.
Finding the right time frame to consider each of these perspectives is also important.
In my experience, the time horizons suggested by Intercom’s 666 Roadmap are helpful: 6 weeks, 6 months and 6 years.
Vision
To do something ambitious and transformative, having an inspiring vision is crucial.
My definition of a product vision:
It brings to life the experience and outcome you want to deliver your users/learners in an inspiring way.
Product visions should be:
A North Star that provides a shared sense of direction.
User-centric, describing the impact from the perspective of your learners/educators.
Inspiring and galvanises a team to deliver it (it’s your best recruiting tool).
Tangible and helps everyone to picture the same thing.
Long-term and not constrained by the realities of today.
Visions are about communicating what you want to create in the next six years: your cathedral. They provide a sense of purpose.
Strategic objective: your goal
The next staging post is considering a strategic objective that will help you start to bring this vision to life.
Being able to describe a clear, measurable and ambitious goal that starts to get you towards the big idea helps focus the mind on how to make it happen and align a team around something specific.
As a team, you’re focused on the same outcome. Building the wall.
This is where many people use Objectives and Key Results (OKRs).
However, for early stage companies, I recommend trying the Narrative, Commitments and Tasks framework (NCTs).
Unlike OKRs, NCTs emphasise the ‘why’ (the narrative) as well as the ‘what’ (commitments) and ‘how’ (tasks). This is particularly important when you’re in the unknown exploration phase, rather than iterating on a more known quantity.
Forcing yourself to reflect and explain what’s going on and how you’re going to respond is helpful for focus and team alignment.
They also help teams that are yet to have much meaningful data to avoid tying themselves in knots trying to do OKRs ‘properly’.
Many organisations plan on a quarterly cycle. In my experience, a quarter is too short to do something really significant. And too long to have a clear plan about how you’re going to do it.
6 months is a good time period to think in a properly ambitious way about what you want to achieve, whilst not too distant to feel fuzzy.
But you should review these ambitious objectives every six weeks and course correct based on what you have learned.
Immediate plan: tasks
Which leads us on to six weeks - your immediate plan.
Six weeks is a time period where you can be quite concrete about what you are going to do. You’re laying the bricks. Each member of the team should be clear about their role, which brick they are responsible for.
You should still plan, course correct and make progress every week or fortnight - the speed of experimentation is crucial at the early stages - but the six week time horizon helps avoid the sense of constant planning and flux that often adds to the chaos of early stage startups.
Cadence and organisational body clock
Whilst I recommend 6 weeks, 6 months and 6 years as a starting point, I also suggest that you also align with the natural rhythms of your business and delivery deadlines. This will help align the whole organisation around the same planning cadence.
At the London Interdisciplinary School we had a concrete plan for the next half term (roughly six weeks) and a more strategic objective for the next couple of terms (roughly six months). Aligning with academic cycle helped plans make sense.
EdTech Example: Sana Labs
Let’s bring this to life with an EdTech example.
Sana Labs is one of the pioneers of personalised learning, experimenting with AI long before Large Language Models created the goldrush.
Their founder, Joel Hellermark is a big proponent of being “silly-ambitious” about your vision and took inspiration from the parable of the three bricklayers.
“When we started Sana, for us this story encapsulated this vision-led approach and became a core value of the company,” says Joel. “We were very inspired by this, how can we ensure that everyone says they are building a cathedral. And more specifically, how can we make sure they know the breakdown from the cathedral to the bricks.”
After experimenting, they also found that the 666 cadence provided the right timeframes to consider these different perspectives.
“The cadence you pick is surprisingly important for finding product-market fit,” says Joel. “And finding the right cadence is extremely tricky. We didn’t get this right to begin with. If you choose the wrong cadence for the longer vision and how you break it down into the bricks, you might find yourself constantly replanning. Or not changing quickly enough.”
The company vision is six years. Then every six months they decide their ‘big bets’.
“We found that we could break these ‘bets’ down into simple 6 week cycles. A quarter is usually too long for detailed planning and too short for achieving something ambitious,” says Joel.
He also notes that being able to break down a complex goal into smaller steps is also important to be successful. “One mistake we’ve made in the past is, because we had a clear vision for the product, we’ve started to build something very complex. Breaking a complex system down into lots of smaller simple systems that work first, is incredibly important.”
Summary
To do something transformative in learning, think about three perspectives and three time horizons:
6 Years: your vision, the cathedral you’re creating and the shared sense of purpose.
6 Months: an ambitious goal that will help get you towards this vision: an outcome.
6 Weeks: the concrete plan for what needs to happen towards this goal: the bricks that you need to lay.
Considering these timeframes will help you create something genuinely transformative.
Go Deeper
These methods are examples of some of the tools I introduce teams to as part of the coaching programme I offer. If you’re building an EdTech startup or an established organisation trying to do something new, get in touch.
This is so timely and very helpful. Thanks for sharing Matt.