Hunting and Farming

On scope, ambition, and knowing when to explore or commit

read time 4 minutes

One of my managers introduced me to an idea years ago when I was at Walmart. At the time, it was meant as a way to think about product scope and team impact. I didn’t realize then how often I’d come back to it, not just in work, but in how I think about building, careers, and even life.

We had just gone through a re-org and formed a new pod focused on new arrivals, seasonality, and trends. On paper, we were part of the search product team. In reality, the problem we were trying to solve didn't live neatly inside search at all.

When you think about newness or trends, you quickly realize you're dealing with the real world: culture, timing, momentum, and signals that move much faster than most retail systems or algorithms are designed to track, unless you’re TikTok.

Speaking of TikTok, that was where I first came across #walmartfinds. We started noticing that certain items would sell out almost immediately after an influencer posted them, yet they wouldn’t surface naturally in search results. You might think the algorithm was broken, but it was actually behaving exactly as designed. The issue was that trends now form and disappear in hours or days, sometimes even minutes, while our systems were optimized for longer feedback cycles.

So we looked outward, comparing trending videos to inventory, asking why certain items took off in the real world but stayed invisible on the website. That pushed us to collaborate with social commerce, merchandising, and trend analytics teams outside of the company, and eventually rethink parts of Walmart’s broader strategy. Just as importantly, those learnings flowed back into how we thought about search itself.

That’s when my manager framed it in a way that gave me language for what we were doing:

Some teams farm, and some teams hunt.

Hunting

Hunting is about venturing out beyond your immediate scope to find new problems worth solving. It’s exploratory, messy, risky. It often looks like doing more than your job description would suggest, and it often requires stepping outside the boundaries of your team, your surface area, or even your org.

Looking back, I realized that instinct showed up in me earlier than that moment. I just didn’t have a name for it. When I was asked to work on cold start problems in search, I didn’t limit myself to search real estate, I started asking a different question: why didn’t we have a meaningful new arrivals experience at all?

That question led to an algorithm-driven page that defined “new” at scale using data, ranked items by predicted engagement, and surfaced them without manual curation. It won Walmart’s internal Shark Tank and eventually shipped.

At the time, I wasn’t trying to expand scope for its own sake. I was following the problem, and it naturally pulled me beyond the system boundary I had been handed. In hindsight, that was hunting. I was challenging Conway's Law without realizing it.

Farming

Farming is different. It is not about expanding the land you work on, but committing to it and tending it well. In product terms, farming is where teams refine, stabilize, and compound value on an existing surface area. It is harder than it looks. There is less novelty to hide behind, progress shows up in small increments, and the work demands patience and consistency more than ambition.

For a long time, I didn’t fully appreciate farming. Hunting felt more exciting, more visible, and frankly more rewarded. We are often taught, implicitly, that progress comes from bold moves and constant expansion. But over time, I’ve noticed something else.

Hunters may bring back the big win, but farmers keep everyone fed, at all times.

In nature, in history, and in business, civilizations don’t survive on hunting alone. They survive because someone stayed, tended the land, and kept things going when exploration slowed.

The same pattern shows up in the business world: someone raises a large round, launches something new, or has a breakout moment, and then the real work begins. Telling the story well, compounding momentum, extracting value from what already exists instead of immediately chasing the next risky bet.

A balance between Hunting and Farming

What I’ve come to believe is that most successful teams, people, and careers are rarely purely hunters or purely farmers. They’re a portfolio of both. Not every team should be hunting all the time. Not every person should be farming forever. Different moments call for different modes.

You see this in life as much as in work: when you feel stuck, restless, or misaligned, that is often a signal to hunt. You can change environments, explore something new, or take a risk that creates step change. And when things are working, when there is momentum and alignment, that is not the moment to burn everything down or put your team at risk. That is when farming matters: staying consistent, deepening the work, and letting what is already growing mature.

I was introduced to this idea as a product framework, but I've come to see it as something broader. It goes beyond prescribing what to do and helps me notice where I am. It gives language to phases that exist whether we name them or not. And once you see it, you have a way of understanding teams, businesses, culture, and even yourself a little better.

Some frameworks are useful because you apply them deliberately. Others are useful because they quietly change how you see things long after you first learn them.

— Akash