Cultivating the garden

If you're ever in the Durham, NC area, a place you should make time to visit is the Sarah P. Duke Gardens next to the Duke University campus. It bears the name of one of the founders of Duke University, who donated $20,000 (a small fortune back in the day!) to establish the gardens. In the springtime, when the cherry blossoms are blooming, it's otherworldly.

Throughout the year you'll notice that the areas of the gardens change, adapting to different seasons, in large part because the staff do an amazing job caring for the plants. They prune, plant, and replant throughout the year. You won't often see them while walking through the gardens, but their work is undoubtedly on display.

Products as gardens

A common practice at product companies is to do "walk the shop" exercises. A group will go through an area of the product end-to-end, flagging things that seem off or could use a revisit, and generally take a step back to assess the product for improvements. It's a helpful exercise! The thinking is that a product is like a store, and you're going through it to see if the items on the shelf look good, are good quality, and are things you would buy. You want to build things that people want to buy.

It’s a reasonable analogy. But, I think it misses the mark. It doesn’t properly describe the nature of products, just the end state of the product you’re looking at.

When I think of a product, I think of it more like a garden. It’s constantly changing. It's growing. Some plants slowly overtake others and need pruning. Some areas need weeding. Others, given a bit more sunlight and water, will really thrive. And if you don't tend and cultivate a garden, it will grow, but it will grow into an overgrown monstrosity. Much like most enterprise SaaS software today.

Focusing on Experience

We've taken this analogy to heart. At Thatch we do monthly "cultivate the garden" sessions, which in practice are the same as a "walk the shop." We get together, walk through a particular area of the product, and find the spots that need a little tending to. We identify areas where we could do a little weeding, a little pruning, maybe even plant new seeds (ideas) to see how they might grow.

In practice, this looks like finding UI/UX paper cuts you might initially miss, uncovering the technical debt we keep kicking down the road, and polishing and repolishing to make sure everything feels just right.

Moreover, we don't just find these things and walk away. A large part of the exercise is staying deliberate about filing tickets, fixing findings, and ensuring we don't let them slip by again. It may seem like a small thing to simply rename this practice (i.e., not calling it "walk the shop"), but it's an intentional framing. It's a signal of how we build, not just what we're doing.

It's not only about what's on the store shelf right now. It's about watching a product grow, much like gardeners watch their gardens grow, and continually finding what needs a bit of tending to.