58. Traveling to the future through the last mile

Reality happens in the last mile.

All our plans, Gantt charts, roadmaps, meetings, designs, tests, and developments are for something to work in the last mile.

The last mile is where our users are operating our products, interacting with our services. It’s where our team deals with symptoms that indicators fail to show.

But most importantly, the last mile is where the future lies.

In the last mile, we can anticipate what will happen. It’s where we first see users who can’t complete tasks, or where we see happy users without needing them to fill out a satisfaction survey.

The last mile is home to your users and the people in your organization who have direct contact with them. Moreover, always remember Krulak’s law of leadership: “The future of an organization is in the hands of the soldiers in the field, not the generals back home.”

In the last mile, we see reality before it becomes indicators on our dashboard.

Don’t forget to visit it often.