Lost in the Woods

Ever feel like your product team is “lost in the woods”? Petra Wille and Teresa Torres borrow a set of “lost person” patterns (what people tend to do when they realize they’re lost) and map them to how teams behave when strategy gets fuzzy, outcomes drift, or constraints aren’t clear. They unpack five common moves—freezing, chasing shortcuts, following the first visible path, relying too heavily on intuition, and retracing your steps—and translate them into practical actions: when to stop and escalate, how to pressure-test a “shortcut” strategy, how to make more paths visible, and how to use principles and discovery loops to reorient.