Houses and Lollipops and Labubus

How to get better at wanting and owning.

My daughter was telling me about the things she would buy with unlimited money: houses and lollipops and Labubus.

I would buy a beach shack. A shack with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the ocean, a waterfall countertop on the kitchen island, a midcentury floating fireplace so I can stay warm in my Eames lounge chair. Clearly I have a funding problem.

This conversation got me thinking about my relationship with stuff:

1. I generally enjoy wanting things more than owning them. Once something is mine, I have to maintain it, live with its limitations, and reckon with what I could have bought instead. The anticipation is almost always better than the reality.
2. I am like a goldfish. I will grow to fill whatever space I occupy.
3. Purchasing has opportunity cost. I have an uncanny ability to make a stretch purchase right before an appliance dies.

My daughter couldn’t care less, but I find that first one interesting for product managers because it’s not just a personal quirk, but it’s something that happens to users too.

People spend months lobbying for a feature, but adoption is disappointing when it’s delivered. It turns out what users wanted was the idea of the feature, not the feature itself. More precisely, they wanted a problem solved, and their proposed solution wasn’t the right one. They didn’t know that until they saw it. Product people are responsible for preventing this awful realization.

Agile is essentially a system for navigating the gap between what we think we want and what we actually need. Rather than building the whole product and discovering the mismatch at the end, practitioners build a thin vertical slice, gain user feedback, and determine actual requirements before committing everything. The wanting phase becomes part of the development process rather than a prologue to it.

The goldfish problem maps onto scope creep. Left unchecked, products expand to fill available development capacity. Unused velocity feels like waste, so we invent work to consume it. Agile’s answer is to build as little as possible and add only what’s demonstrably needed. Lean by default, not by discipline.

Opportunity cost is really about fragility. A stretch purchase isn’t dangerous because it crowds out alternatives. It’s dangerous because it eliminates margin. When the inevitable surprise arrives, there’s nowhere for it to land. Incremental delivery keeps margin intact, protecting against fragility. Development can’t always stop mid-cycle, but work can be reprioritized. The blast radius of a wrong turn stays small because the commitment stays small, so a surprise is survivable.

None of this is a revelation to Agile practitioners, but I find it useful to occasionally reconnect the methodology to the human behavior it’s designed to account for. We build processes to protect against our own tendencies, and it’s easy to follow the process without remembering why it exists.

Anyway. I’ll keep practicing with lollipops and Labubus for now. One day, hopefully, a beach shack.