Finish line is the point in your journey(or race) where you complete the race and you don’t have to run any more. You can pick up another race, yes, but you won’t continue in that race.
Imagine you are in a running race. You are standing at the starting block, shaking your legs, loosening up those calf and thigh muscles. You put your feet on the starting block, getting ready to pounce, anticipating the bang of the starting pistol. Suddenly you don’t remember if it is a 100 mtr sprint or a 10km marathon. You ask the person next to you and they say ‘there is no finish line, you just keep running!’. Would you want to participate in such a race, would anyone?
As product leaders (PMs, Engineering managers, product designers, marketeers), a lot of times we do the same thing with our projects. We know the problem we are solving but we don’t know when to stop solving it, we fail to define the finish line. When we don’t define the finish line(or the scope), we can go down a slippery slope of ‘if only we build one more thing, customers will use this module’, ‘if only we build one more capability, then perhaps customers won’t churn’ etc. Yes, it is good to have a roadmap of features/enhancements but each of those should be part of another project. Those things can be a ‘2.0’ project, based on the feedback you received from shipping the 1.0 project.
The advantages of defining the finish line (scope of the project) are:
You can manage your managers (and up) better.
Once you have the finish line, you can further divide them into milestones. That progress bar helps you manage your manager. They don’t have to constantly ask you if everything is going as per plan, they don’t have to micromanage you. You can just send a link to the progress bar and as they see it moving towards the finish line, they have a good idea of how the team is doing.
Your co-owners get a good idea when they need to start working on the project.
For PMs, co-owners can be marketing folks, sales team, customer success team etc. They can follow the progress bar to the finish line and they will know when to start training the sales team with the sales pitch, when the customer success team can provide a high confidence ETA to the customer who was waiting for that feature, when the marketing team can deploy the landing page or schedule the emailers etc.
Your team (squad) feel motivated when they near the finish line.
The toughest period for any team is when they hit around 80% of the project, that is where the unknown unknowns start showing up, that is when the work begins to take its toll with some people burning out, or the scope creep will begin to emerge. If you have defined the finish line in advance, the team knows that scope cannot drastically change, they clearly know how much more work is left before calling it ‘done’. They will be energized they see the finish line in the horizon, like a marathon runner rejuvenated at the sight of the finish line.
Remember the ‘running race’ analogy, no one in the team will want to run the race if the finish line is not defined.