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> Determining which organizational complexity is essential and which is accidental is likely the quintessential hard problem of business. Three questions. (1)

by ethbro 6y ago

> Determining which organizational complexity is essential and which is accidental is likely the quintessential hard problem of business. Three questions. (1) "What would the impact on our business be if we built the best possible, state of the art feature here?" (2) "What would the impact on our business be if we half-assed a solution in a quarter of the time?" (3) "What would the impact on our business be if we utterly failed?" (Usually, the different between 1 & 2 is negligible. Sometimes, between 1 & 3. Don't ask people to justify success. Ask them to justify why we should spend any more time than slightly-above-failure.)

munificent 6y ago
Those questions assume an existing framework where "the feature", "state of the art", "half-assed", and "failed" are all well-defined. But my experience is that the framing itself is most of where the challenge lies. You end up with team A who wants to add the feature, team B who thinks it's an anti-feature, team C who thinks the entire application where feature lives should be scrapped, PM D who says users can already accomplish what the feature does using existing features, UX design E who says the fact that users are still asking for the feature means all those other features must be poorly designed and we should fix those...
- vishnugupta 6y ago
  That second paragraph summarized the last 5 years of my professional career.
- srnvs123 6y ago
  In my experience, I've always listened to the last UX design E guy. Every time we worked on what he said the users asked for, we did well..
jpalomaki 6y ago
The problems caused by "half-assed" solutions are likely somewhere down the line, in distant future and their true costs impossible to estimate.
- ethbro 6y ago
  Anything less than perfection will incure avoidable future costs, and perfection approaches infinite time to deliver. Ergo, standing in the present, one should do ones best to estimate future costs and decide what percent of perfection seems optimal. In reality, when asked to self-estimate, too many teams (and especially naive PMs) select perfection as the optimal approach.

by ethbro 6y ago

munificent 6y ago

Those questions assume an existing framework where "the feature", "state of the art", "half-assed", and "failed" are all well-defined. But my experience is that the framing itself is most of where the challenge lies. You end up with team A who wants to add the feature, team B who thinks it's an anti-feature, team C who thinks the entire application where feature lives should be scrapped, PM D who says users can already accomplish what the feature does using existing features, UX design E who says the fact that users are still asking for the feature means all those other features must be poorly designed and we should fix those...

vishnugupta 6y ago
That second paragraph summarized the last 5 years of my professional career.
srnvs123 6y ago
In my experience, I've always listened to the last UX design E guy. Every time we worked on what he said the users asked for, we did well..

jpalomaki 6y ago

The problems caused by "half-assed" solutions are likely somewhere down the line, in distant future and their true costs impossible to estimate.

ethbro 6y ago
Anything less than perfection will incure avoidable future costs, and perfection approaches infinite time to deliver. Ergo, standing in the present, one should do ones best to estimate future costs and decide what percent of perfection seems optimal. In reality, when asked to self-estimate, too many teams (and especially naive PMs) select perfection as the optimal approach.