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A lot of this is work culture. You can push back by trying to formalize the research phase. Saying "I'm working on the architecture/design document, we have s
by tim58 7y ago
A lot of this is work culture. You can push back by trying to formalize the research phase. Saying "I'm working on the architecture/design document, we have some known unknowns regarding [foo] I'm hammering out" shows other people in the meeting that you are working towards their problem in a meaningful and structured way.
Ultimately, if the people in the org want to push the work to xyz instead I would let them. Maybe xyz is as good as they think, but probably everyone in that room will enter a slog project/feature.
When someone makes a threat your default behavior shouldn't be to back down.
- reviel 7y agodefinitely needed this, thanks!
- alexpetralia 7y agoThis is a good answer. What managers dislike is a lack of transparency. "Research" is very vague. How can anyone tell what you were researching, or what the result of it was? A very clear spec doc is a useful tool - almost like writing an essay - to demonstrate what your research uncovered.
- pbh101 7y agoAgreed on the structure part: structuring research is incredibly helpful for guiding the research itself, knowing what’s left to do, and the nice bonus of also making it easier to share the results, both incremental and final. Research is in many ways naturally more unstructured than other dev tasks and people don’t get too much practice at doing or delegating it, so it can be fertile ground for organizational misunderstandings. Structure agreed upon up front can help all that.
- tim58 7y agoI think they key word in my post wasn't "structured" but "shows". Even if the occasion calls for 100% unstructured research (let's spend some time in the sandbox to see what we can do with some new software) it's a critical skill to be able to communicate what you learned during that phase with other people, even people with different job titles and backgrounds. I suggested formalizing and structure as words because new features/products/projects are a common enough occurrence that we have standard procedures for it.
- jph 7y agoArchitecture decision records (ADR) are an excellent way to show managers that work is proceeding, and that research is necessary, structured, timeboxed, and transparent. https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/architecture_decision_record https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/architecture_decision...