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I’m an ideas guy and it’s been very frustrating to have to raise to ascend the stigma. I iterate solutions much faster than most. Ive also since college done t

I’m an ideas guy and it’s been very frustrating to have to raise to ascend the stigma. I iterate solutions much faster than most. Ive also since college done the hard yards to learn to execute/lead and obtain multiple deep skills including coding. I know what people are talking about with the “all talk no action” person. That’s not me, some of us really are excellent at iterating good ideas. It’s a discarded skill, but highly valuable once I’m on most teams, I can just never promote this strength due to the stigma.

mikepurvis 5y ago
I'm a pretty idea-ish person, and I sometimes intentionally rein in the "where we really want to get to with this" talk if I feel like the audience isn't right, but I think the real key is emphasizing what has been done already and what the immediate next steps are— that puts the accountability out there and keeps the conversation grounded in reality. I think another litmus test for idea-executor vs pure executor is your willingness to do throw-away work. A pure executor reads the design doc, says "sure", and just builds it— an idea-executor recognizes that the long-term maintenance of the system will almost certainly dwarf the initial cost of coding it up, and is willing to extend the discovery phase with partially-functional prototypes and so-on in order to really get a firm handle on whether the thing is going to go where they want it to go. (Recent example— building up chunks of a moderately complicated build setup in parallel in Jenkins Pipeline and GitLab CI in order to understand how the two solutions would compare on maintainability, end user ergonomics, permissions hassles, flexibility, how much documentation we would need to support it, etc etc.)
ackbar03 5y ago
Maybe your not following through enough? I feel like if your one to always iterate on ideas and follow through and do a good job, you'll be more of a bad ass, I doubt there would be any stigma
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  generating an idea or a solution is of course easier than following through, if you generate solutions and ideas quicker than most people it means you will have lots of ideas and solutions, you then need to develop the skill of only saying the best ideas otherwise with all the ideas you will be too enervating (and some times you will fail at this task) furthermore there are some careers that mean you will not develop a reputation for follow through before you develop a reputation for ideas, for example if you are a consultant and brought into a place you will say a lot of ideas before you have the chance to follow through. In these situations you will be seen as all talk no action because you start off with lots of talk and nobody has experienced your actions. I'm sure similar scenarios can spring to mind.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> Ive also since college done the hard yards to learn to execute/lead and obtain multiple deep skills including coding. If you’re actually executing and delivering results then you aren’t the stereotypical “idea guy” referred to here. The problem with the stereotypical “idea guy” is that their flurry of ideas and constant changes becomes a roadblock to delivering anything at all. Their team is constantly destroyed by direction changes and burned out from chasing moving targets before they can possibly hit those targets. The idea guy personality is the embodiment of the phrase “perfect is the enemy of good”. Every team has constrained resources, so delivering something imperfect is better than not delivering anything at all because the team burned out and ran out of money because the ideas were iterated faster than execution could allow.
- planet-and-halo 5y ago
  This is why economic thinking should be a part of every team's process. One of the major problems with technical projects is that many people can give an estimate of their value but only the developers can give an estimate of the cost—and they can usually only do that effectively after some iterations and starting to sketch out the problem. Usually organizations just ignore this problem and try to fix the cost upfront, which is where the whole "mythical man month / hours" phenomenon comes from. In a well-functioning Lean/Agile/whatever-you-want-to-call-it organization, there should be a constant ongoing evaluation of the work and its cost/benefit, and that should be updated as the devs learn more about the problem. When you do this, ideas are no longer "good" or "bad," they just have a value estimate and can be evaluated against other ideas. (And you can factor in things like switching costs when people throw out something totally new.)
  - Dracophoenix 5y ago
    While I think that kind of thinking the kind that encourages bean counting and half-assery in the name of profit? I would certainly agree that having an ongoing basis for calculation is a metric. But when that metric becomes a target (and it will), you get disasters like the 737 MAX.
    - 5y ago
qsort 5y ago
I don't think anybody is questioning the value of good, fresh ideas, but what the article outlines is a real problem. The "armchair quarterback" non-technical type is especially annoying because it creates a bad feedback loop: - Idea guy says we should make a water-powered ferrari that costs $100. - Technicians shut it down as impossible. - Idea guy complains that technicians are short-sighted and shut down all of their ideas. - Goto step 1. I'm myself somewhat of a daydreamy type, but we have to understand that unless there's a specific, detailed plan, ideas really are a dime a dozen.
- virgilp 5y ago
  It's always fun to take an "impossible" ask and figure out a way to make it possible. In your case, this one is far closer to possibility that you might've realized - take a H2GO [+], make it ~20% cheaper and slap a ferrari logo on it, and you're good. I'm not even trolling - sometimes playing with the 'impossible' demand yields useful results. You were just trying to create an artificially-impossible demand, so in this case it's not useful - but if it's a real customer "impossible" demand, trying to make it possible by rethinking the constraints can be actually valuable. [+] https://www.amazon.com/Hydrogen-Powered-Radio-Control-Standard/dp/B001KYKN16 https://www.amazon.com/Hydrogen-Powered-Radio-Control-Standa...
  - qsort 5y ago
    I agree that what you are saying is useful, i.e. identify the minimal sets of contradicting constraints, but if you can relax a constraint, then you are effectively solving a different problem. OTOH it's pretty well known that customers mostly don't know what they want, so deciding what is actually a constraint and what isn't is, paradoxically, a part of the job.
- convolvatron 5y ago
  the point to me here is that the really valuable ideas aren't just some thing that someone has in the absence of context. given the situation on the ground - this approach will nicely balance all the constraints. this idea explicitly recasts an existing machine into one which is simpler and more general. you dont have these ideas unless you are intimately familiar with the territory. and if you aren't, its very likely that any suggestions you might have wont be relevant because of its features.
MattGaiser 5y ago
You should market it as "iterations delivery guy" as "ideas guy" makes me just think of a guy with a notepad writing down random things every few minutes.
duxup 5y ago
>execute I think that's the thing the article notes to look for to find the right ideas person. They're 'risky', but the article isn't saying they're 'bad'. It sounds like you would pass their test as far as being able to execute.
danaris 5y ago
If you're actually good at iterating solutions, then you may not be an "ideas guy"—or at least, not just an ideas guy. My wife, in her previous job, was asked to do various kinds of "strengths evaluations" as her department wallowed and wandered trying to find a better direction (part of why it's her previous job...) and while I'm not sure how scientific any of them were, they were somewhat interesting. One of them divided people up into four groups (whose precise names I may not all be getting right): Creatives, Executors, Marketers, and Refiners. Each of these was vital at some point in the lifetime of a product or service, but the one that particularly interested us was Refiners. Previously, she'd thought of herself as very much a Creative type—an ideas person—but this drew a distinction between someone who just comes up with all kinds of crazy ideas—the Creative—and someone who can take ideas and iterate on them until they're actually executable—the Refiner. Particularly in the environment she was in, that was a very useful distinction to be able to make, as there were a lot of people around her who just came up with idea after idea with no real concept of a) how to execute it, or b) whether it was actually going to be a good idea if they could.
crazypython 5y ago
My team has an ideas person. But he is only responsible for the first iteration of an idea. I get an uber-complicated idea I break down into small pieces and iterate on it until it's good– I'm executing. I set the target and keep the team focused on the current main goal. The idea person hates me for it, because he sees good ideas being ignored. Those good ideas won't deliver substantial value to users until the next milestone is completed, because it is blocking something more important.

mikepurvis 5y ago

I'm a pretty idea-ish person, and I sometimes intentionally rein in the "where we really want to get to with this" talk if I feel like the audience isn't right, but I think the real key is emphasizing what has been done already and what the immediate next steps are— that puts the accountability out there and keeps the conversation grounded in reality. I think another litmus test for idea-executor vs pure executor is your willingness to do throw-away work. A pure executor reads the design doc, says "sure", and just builds it— an idea-executor recognizes that the long-term maintenance of the system will almost certainly dwarf the initial cost of coding it up, and is willing to extend the discovery phase with partially-functional prototypes and so-on in order to really get a firm handle on whether the thing is going to go where they want it to go. (Recent example— building up chunks of a moderately complicated build setup in parallel in Jenkins Pipeline and GitLab CI in order to understand how the two solutions would compare on maintainability, end user ergonomics, permissions hassles, flexibility, how much documentation we would need to support it, etc etc.)

ackbar03 5y ago

Maybe your not following through enough? I feel like if your one to always iterate on ideas and follow through and do a good job, you'll be more of a bad ass, I doubt there would be any stigma

bryanrasmussen 5y ago
generating an idea or a solution is of course easier than following through, if you generate solutions and ideas quicker than most people it means you will have lots of ideas and solutions, you then need to develop the skill of only saying the best ideas otherwise with all the ideas you will be too enervating (and some times you will fail at this task) furthermore there are some careers that mean you will not develop a reputation for follow through before you develop a reputation for ideas, for example if you are a consultant and brought into a place you will say a lot of ideas before you have the chance to follow through. In these situations you will be seen as all talk no action because you start off with lots of talk and nobody has experienced your actions. I'm sure similar scenarios can spring to mind.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> Ive also since college done the hard yards to learn to execute/lead and obtain multiple deep skills including coding. If you’re actually executing and delivering results then you aren’t the stereotypical “idea guy” referred to here. The problem with the stereotypical “idea guy” is that their flurry of ideas and constant changes becomes a roadblock to delivering anything at all. Their team is constantly destroyed by direction changes and burned out from chasing moving targets before they can possibly hit those targets. The idea guy personality is the embodiment of the phrase “perfect is the enemy of good”. Every team has constrained resources, so delivering something imperfect is better than not delivering anything at all because the team burned out and ran out of money because the ideas were iterated faster than execution could allow.

planet-and-halo 5y ago
This is why economic thinking should be a part of every team's process. One of the major problems with technical projects is that many people can give an estimate of their value but only the developers can give an estimate of the cost—and they can usually only do that effectively after some iterations and starting to sketch out the problem. Usually organizations just ignore this problem and try to fix the cost upfront, which is where the whole "mythical man month / hours" phenomenon comes from. In a well-functioning Lean/Agile/whatever-you-want-to-call-it organization, there should be a constant ongoing evaluation of the work and its cost/benefit, and that should be updated as the devs learn more about the problem. When you do this, ideas are no longer "good" or "bad," they just have a value estimate and can be evaluated against other ideas. (And you can factor in things like switching costs when people throw out something totally new.)
- Dracophoenix 5y ago
  While I think that kind of thinking the kind that encourages bean counting and half-assery in the name of profit? I would certainly agree that having an ongoing basis for calculation is a metric. But when that metric becomes a target (and it will), you get disasters like the 737 MAX.
  - 5y ago

qsort 5y ago

I don't think anybody is questioning the value of good, fresh ideas, but what the article outlines is a real problem. The "armchair quarterback" non-technical type is especially annoying because it creates a bad feedback loop: - Idea guy says we should make a water-powered ferrari that costs $100. - Technicians shut it down as impossible. - Idea guy complains that technicians are short-sighted and shut down all of their ideas. - Goto step 1. I'm myself somewhat of a daydreamy type, but we have to understand that unless there's a specific, detailed plan, ideas really are a dime a dozen.

virgilp 5y ago
It's always fun to take an "impossible" ask and figure out a way to make it possible. In your case, this one is far closer to possibility that you might've realized - take a H2GO [+], make it ~20% cheaper and slap a ferrari logo on it, and you're good. I'm not even trolling - sometimes playing with the 'impossible' demand yields useful results. You were just trying to create an artificially-impossible demand, so in this case it's not useful - but if it's a real customer "impossible" demand, trying to make it possible by rethinking the constraints can be actually valuable. [+] https://www.amazon.com/Hydrogen-Powered-Radio-Control-Standard/dp/B001KYKN16 https://www.amazon.com/Hydrogen-Powered-Radio-Control-Standa...
- qsort 5y ago
  I agree that what you are saying is useful, i.e. identify the minimal sets of contradicting constraints, but if you can relax a constraint, then you are effectively solving a different problem. OTOH it's pretty well known that customers mostly don't know what they want, so deciding what is actually a constraint and what isn't is, paradoxically, a part of the job.
convolvatron 5y ago
the point to me here is that the really valuable ideas aren't just some thing that someone has in the absence of context. given the situation on the ground - this approach will nicely balance all the constraints. this idea explicitly recasts an existing machine into one which is simpler and more general. you dont have these ideas unless you are intimately familiar with the territory. and if you aren't, its very likely that any suggestions you might have wont be relevant because of its features.

MattGaiser 5y ago

You should market it as "iterations delivery guy" as "ideas guy" makes me just think of a guy with a notepad writing down random things every few minutes.

duxup 5y ago

>execute I think that's the thing the article notes to look for to find the right ideas person. They're 'risky', but the article isn't saying they're 'bad'. It sounds like you would pass their test as far as being able to execute.

danaris 5y ago

If you're actually good at iterating solutions, then you may not be an "ideas guy"—or at least, not just an ideas guy. My wife, in her previous job, was asked to do various kinds of "strengths evaluations" as her department wallowed and wandered trying to find a better direction (part of why it's her previous job...) and while I'm not sure how scientific any of them were, they were somewhat interesting. One of them divided people up into four groups (whose precise names I may not all be getting right): Creatives, Executors, Marketers, and Refiners. Each of these was vital at some point in the lifetime of a product or service, but the one that particularly interested us was Refiners. Previously, she'd thought of herself as very much a Creative type—an ideas person—but this drew a distinction between someone who just comes up with all kinds of crazy ideas—the Creative—and someone who can take ideas and iterate on them until they're actually executable—the Refiner. Particularly in the environment she was in, that was a very useful distinction to be able to make, as there were a lot of people around her who just came up with idea after idea with no real concept of a) how to execute it, or b) whether it was actually going to be a good idea if they could.

crazypython 5y ago

My team has an ideas person. But he is only responsible for the first iteration of an idea. I get an uber-complicated idea I break down into small pieces and iterate on it until it's good– I'm executing. I set the target and keep the team focused on the current main goal. The idea person hates me for it, because he sees good ideas being ignored. Those good ideas won't deliver substantial value to users until the next milestone is completed, because it is blocking something more important.