Project Eagle
How might we achieve our fitness goals?
What is it?
An impulse experiment to see what would happen if you applied outcome oriented roadmap frameworks to your health and fitness goals. This 3 month pilot program included 4 participants who were frustrated with struggling with seemingly unattainable physical and health goals. At the end of the program, participants not only decreased unhealthy habits such as weekly drinking and unsustainable sleep patterns but they gained a new perspective on what they actually valued fitness wise and improved their weekly time management.
The Experiment - 3 months
The Steps
Individuals generated ideal personas of themselves many years from now
Tracked current state metrics (IE hours of sleep, gym habits, cooking habits)
Dump and sort of our "wishes" and synthesized themes and ranked them
Find the dichotomy between current habits and strategy goals to pinpoint what to start on first
Generate action items (get a physical check up, join a gym trial)
Generate recurring trackable habits (walk 10k steps a day, cook at home 4x a week etc)
The Format
Weekly meetings to talk about weekly schedule and events to determine how many habits could be achieved that week
Track habits daily & share with the group
Iterate on habits and action items
Where did this idea come from?
As a product manager, I've worked with traditional product roadmaps that consist of fixed feature lists, emphasize delivery dates, are defined by people outside of the core product team and can span over years. I've found that traditional roadmaps are ineffective because they assume we can predict the future, create perfect plans, celebrates shipping over creating impact and the team almost never hits the "deadline".
In comparison, an outcome orientated roadmap assumes uncertainty and change which optimized for learning and iteration while focusing on outcomes ( the way a thing turns out) and not outputs (the amount of something produced by a person, machine or industry)
I've personally struggled with my own fitness and health goals and have been on top of every fitness trend like peanut on butter. However, its led to a vicious cycle of yo yo dieting, outside noise from friends, coaches and family and inconsistent workout habits. After chatting with some friends about our frustrations we realized that if we applied the same principles to our health and fitness we could potentially make progress. By focusing on our self defined fitness outcomes, it propels us in the direction we plan to go in while giving us space to adjust while we learn more about ourselves.
