What is the Firmament?
The second day of creation is packed with wonderful mysteries. What are the waters? What is the firmament? Where is the firmament above?
The English word heaven here doesn’t quite give us the right sense of what the samayim God creates here is. The easiest non-literal description would be “everything above us,” including both the atmosphere and space.
What might be missed is God’s creation of a place.
None of what follows in the rest of human history can happen apart from God making a place in Genesis 2. God is creating the setting for redemptive history. It happens here, under the firmament.
Consider for a moment the emphasis on how God makes this place on the second day. He separates here from the vast expanse of everything else. The expanse is so large, secular cosmologists debate to this day whether it is infinite or not. God will place the sun, moon, and all of the stars in the firmament of the heavens there on day four. Yet is all of that grandeur the focus of the creation narrative? It is not. The focal point is the tiny, beautiful, place God is making for mankind.
How should this shape the way we think about products? I suggest every product must find a focus. Product creators should decide on the setting, the moment, the finite problem they will solve. Then they must separate and protect this focus from all of the rest of the unformed void of other opportunities around it. They must give this focus air to breathe.
If this step is skipped, what follows cannot thrive. Businesses that can’t focus fail. Products that try to solve everything end up solving nothing. Yet nothing is easier or more common in business than distraction. If you solve someone’s real problem, there’s a great chance they’re going to come to you and ask you to solve another one. And you can, provided you protect the product you’ve already made, and give the new problem its own new universe, with all of the breathing room and space it needs.
In large, ambitious companies, enacting this kind of protection is the critical responsibility of the product professional. Creating definition where none exists protects and enables the work of all others attached to a project. What will marketers market? What will salesmen sell? What will the engineers make? This must be defined and guarded.
Great teams filled with bright, competent people are usually bursting with big ideas, raw possibilities, urgent customer demands, and visions of the future.
But someone must separate the waters from the waters.
Someone must give the product space.
This article was adapted from my book, “Undiscovered: Adventure, Conquest, and the Search for Great Products”