> there are seven words no competent showrunner should ever say: "I'll know it when I see it."
> To say "I'll know it when I see it" is to abdicate the hard work of creation while hoarding the authority to declare what is or isn't good.
critical product leadership advice. listen to users yes, but at any given point you have to know what your vision is and how features speak to strategy
stuff on p6 about defining problems and decision aversion on 7 also very good.
That's from the "Nice version". The "Mean version" no longer seems to be available on the web for free, but I read it years ago. In the "Mean version", he points out that many showrunners feel they're impostors. A showrunner who says "I'll know it when I see it" is an impostor, because their job is to have a clear vision of the project and be able to communicate it to the crew.
Ah. Thanks. Here's the "mean version" of the quote to which I was referring:
Well... it is true that not everyone believes that knowing what
they want, and reaching out to those who need to know it in order
to perform, is a necessity for success in the world of
television... and this is the part where they come out from their
slimy, shit-stained hole and excuse their lack of vision (or
their unwillingness to impart that vision) with a defense I
consider to be the most cowardly and thieving seven words in the
showrunner's lexicon:
"I'll know it when I see it."
If you ever find yourself saying that, kindly consider the
possibility that - and I mean this, from the heart - your
impostor syndrome is most likely real and you are, in fact, a
shrill, shrieking fraud.
That paper is interesting as a perspective on project management. Some points:
- Showrunners, at least in the US, are primarily writers. Not directors. Not managers. The directors and managers work for them. Their primary job is the creative concept, expressed in writing as a script. Their secondary job is to make it all happen.
Outside of TV, this is rare in industry. It was once the case in aircraft design, where one person did the original drawings, and others filled in the details. Many great aircraft resulted. Plus many duds.
It's interesting that, in TV, writers are in charge. In film, directors are in charge. This comes from stage productions, where the director uses the actors as a debug tool. A normal part of getting a new play working involves the actors on stage in practice clothes, the director in the front row of the auditorium, and running through each scene of the play with repeated changes. Film directors who came from the theater tended to require too many takes to get a scene right. That's what resulted in "pre-visualization", where the movie is made twice, once in a skeletal low-budget form, then for real. That comes from cartoons, where a basic tool was a board with a card and a sketch for each scene. The cartoon emerged as incremental improvement from the storyboard. It's a basic tool of effects-heavy films today. (As someone said of a Star Wars movie, "Three years of pre-production, three months of principal photography, three years of post-production")
The fundamental question here is, how and when do you debug the user experience? The earlier in the process you can do that, the cheaper it is to fix.
- The section on showrunners spending too much time tweaking post-production is apt. It can be even worse for films, where the time schedule isn't so tight. I once heard someone involved with "Space Jam" (1996, not the sequel) describe trying to get right the animation sequence where the players' "talent" is sucked out. Each morning, there was a screening, and the execs would critique that scene ("The slime needs to be thicker, and it needs more purple".) The animators would spend the rest of the day fixing that. Second shift did rendering and output to film. Third shift did film development and printing. Next morning, the cycle would repeat. That went on for a month. Today you can cycle that faster, but it's still "I'll know it when I see it".
This article is one of my all-time favourite pieces of writing about engineering management and startup founding, despite supposedly not being about that at all.
Think about what it takes to be a showrunner of a TV show. You spend years pitching an idea. It gets picked up... and suddenly you're in charge of a 100+ person startup, with a fixed budget, an immovable deadline and extremely activist investors.
And you're still expected to write the first and last episode of the season!
> To say "I'll know it when I see it" is to abdicate the hard work of creation while hoarding the authority to declare what is or isn't good.
critical product leadership advice. listen to users yes, but at any given point you have to know what your vision is and how features speak to strategy
stuff on p6 about defining problems and decision aversion on 7 also very good.