Did you know I had a whole career in specialty coffee before I became part of the tech industry?

It’s true – I trained hundreds of baristas, some of them competitors (barista competitions are a thing!), opened a number of cafes, developed a whole multi-course curriculum, I also kind of interestingly in retrospect did some product work with muffins?

One of the most memorable aspects of that time in my life was buying coffee, by which I mean, working with importers and exporters to source the green unroasted coffee to bring to the States, to then store, roast, sometimes blend, and serve in the cafes.

There are a whole library of ways that you can try to ensure taste (at a given price and availability) in the cup through the buying process. There’s a Sommelier type test for folks who do coffee buying professionally (which I did not pass by the way!) One of the most common tools in the toolbox is an exercise called cupping.

Cupping involves standing at a table, usually a very long table, where there are a collection of little groups of cups (the standard for professional buying sessions is 5, but I’ve been at tables with 3 or 4 cups per group, like in the image above), with each group holding a particular coffee from a particular farm. You might be tasting fifteen coffees, which would mean fifteen little groups around the edge of the table. Then, you and your colleagues and partners walk around the table, use your individual spoon to taste the different samples and different coffees, take lots of notes, and decide what fits your needs for the coming season.

Imagine instead, packing your bags, flying to Guatemala, taking a drive into the mountains, roasting, grinding, and setting up a single cup of a single coffee, giving that one lonesome sample a try, and your import partner turning to you and asking, “Well, should we buy it?”

Even if you’d tasted hundreds of coffees in your life, it would be incredibly challenging to consistently make the right decision in that moment.

Humans are really good at comparing. When we have the chance to assess multiple options, in real time, all together, especially in discussion with others, we are much more successful when we have a small number of things to compare and contrast to one another, rather than having a single yes-no binary choice.

So we never only try one coffee. You try lots of coffees, and you keep trying them as they cool, to help get as much information about the different options, the trade-offs, and guide you in making the best choice you can.

The thing is, this is also true for making decisions in other fields, especially in Product, whether prioritizing a feature or making a whole roadmap, or hiring onto your team. You will always make better choices when you give yourself the space and process where you consider and discuss alternatives and the trade offs between them.

Something happens in the process of discussing trade-offs – it forces you (and your colleagues!) to get really clear on your thinking, and it can help draw out benefits and drawbacks that wouldn’t have arisen if you’d only tasted the One Coffee.

Teresa Torres (absolute luminary, her book is a must-read imo) outlines a great way to do this in the Opportunity Solution Tree exercise. If you give that approach a try, you’ll have lots of options to consider!

If we’re talking about the Ideal Platonic Product Organization (which doesn’t exist, by the way!), following our successful Opportunity Solution Tree exercise, we’d produce a ranked list of these potential opportunities to prioritize, and then we’d leverage our reliable, fast, and effective experimentation framework to run tiny inexpensive experiments to determine which possible direction would go the best with your customers and infrastructure, and then execute on that opportunity.

I can’t speak for other fields, but in developing software, Only One Coffee can sneak up on you.

“When can we schedule the Anti Light Particle Beam feature?” … when you hadn’t even heard about the Anti Light Particle Beam feature!

“Nautical Cloud Experience says we need to build the Zoidberg Platform v3 out by end of March to unblock their P Zeroes.” … but Zoidberg v2 was never even completed!

In situations like these, it’s incumbent on the Product organization to say, “Wait, hold on a minute, let’s think about what our alternatives are,” and then do so in a structured way. Remember, you always have the choice to do nothing! Between the proposed Single Coffee, and the evergeen Do Nothing, if you come up with only one or two other possible paths to a solution, you’ll already be in much, much better shape.

You won’t always get the chance to go through Discovery exercises, and you won’t always have the experimental infrastructure or organizational support to run lots of iterative experiments. But you can always ensure that you’re considering alternatives, and giving yourself and your firm the best chance at building the right thing.

The most important thing a Product organization does is avoid building The Wrong Thing. Never taste only one coffee.