Happy Friday,

For those of you who don't know, I keep bees as a hobby. This year, I had some big ambitions with my hives to raise queens for the first time, and wind up with eight or so hives.

Things did not go the way I planned.

Now, raising queens is an interesting process based on manipulating honeybee behavior. It is a little too complicated to discuss in this newsletter, though. I will say that I failed three different times to raise queens.

I took a class on raising queens, got the equipment, made a plan, and followed what I learned dutifully, but failed. I tried two more times with failures each time.

Even though I had a plan, my bees didn't care about my plan.

So it goes with many people's great idea for a product. The world is like my bees and doesn't tend to care about anyone's plan.

Each attempt to raise queens, I'd go early to see if things were looking good. Each time, they would not look good. This allowed me to reset and try again quickly. This rapid feedback allowed me to try three times in the span that a normal plan would have only allowed for 1.5 attempts.

Even though my attempts failed, I learned something that wasn't covered in the class that I had to gain through practical experience. Each attempt, I tried a small variation based on what I saw and learned.

These last two paragraphs are behaviors that mature product managers and product organizations have. They work in a way to get feedback on their plans as early as possible to adapt, and each attempt is built around a hypothesis formed by the data around them.

If I had operated like many groups, I would have formed my plan, executed it, and found out at the deadline that nothing worked.

I can't blame you if you're reading this thinking that either way failed, and that's true. However, there is a huge difference in how we failed. The one-shot approach only gave one opportunity to learn or try. I had three. I made three bets when others could only have made one.

Sincerely,

Ryan

PS: If you'd like to keep up with my beekeeping activities, I post occasional videos of my adventures. I also work with product groups to improve adoption and revenue. In some cases, adding tens of millions of revenue. If you'd like help, schedule a call.

Here's my weekly update for May 23rd, 2025...

🗒️ Better Communication for Busy Leaders

Miscommunication cripples productivity in groups.

In this article you'll learn the root causes of miscommunication and effective countermeasures to stay productuve.

Click here to read more

🗒️ The Ultimate Guide to Effective Horizon Planning

Horizon plans are a lightweight tool to communicate long-term strategic goals.

In this article I will break down how to build, use, and update them so you can communicate more strategically and adapt more quickly.

Click here to read more

Enjoy,

Ryan Latta