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As a thought experiment: even though it's impossible to meaningfully answer "how long can we spend on this without losing money on it?", imagine some omniscient

by e1g 5y ago

As a thought experiment: even though it's impossible to meaningfully answer "how long can we spend on this without losing money on it?", imagine some omniscient Business Analyst does the math and confidently declares, "I expect this button to increase our profit margin by $300k p.a.". Presumably, the developer now has the commercial guidance to announce, "My salary is $200k, so yes, I will create this button in the next 12 months, and it will be my only job to oversee The Button as long as it exists, and the business still gets to keep $100k p.a. Great planning session." Estimations and prioritization systems are entire complex fields we could debate. I'm not trying to do that; I'm saying that asking "how long can we spend on this without losing money on it?" will not be a productive addition to most (all?) discussions with developers/product owners/executives/clients.

kqr 5y ago
How do you define "meaningfully answer" to arrive at the conclusion that it's impossible? To me, meaningfully answering that is just as possible as meaningfully answering "when will Tobias die" which is something life insurance companies have done for a very long time.
- e1g 5y ago
  We're getting quite off topic here, but the "duration of a human life" follows a narrow, predictable, bell-curve-shaped distribution. "Impact of this feature" does not - it follows the power-law distribution. Life insurance companies can meaningfully estimate when you'll die, but they cannot meaningfully estimate the value of attending any given party/meeting/trip/conversation. Most of those will be meaningless by comparison to the few that cause an inflection point and make your life worth living, often by accident.
  - kqr 5y ago
    The neat thing about these power law numbers is that you don't need to estimate whether we're talking 83 or 91. You just need to do enough work to tell apart 1000 from 10, which is often considerably easier. And note that I'm not saying you'll always know down to the cent, or even closest hundred dollar bill. Sometimes your best estimation is going to be "between zero and 999999" and that's fine. If you've determined that, you also know which of your inputs have the most uncertainly, and that might represent a blind spot of yours at an important aspect of the business. Or it represents a fundamentally unknowable thing. But then at least you know you're staking this part of the development on a fundamentally unknowable thing. That's more than many other know.

by e1g 5y ago

kqr 5y ago

How do you define "meaningfully answer" to arrive at the conclusion that it's impossible? To me, meaningfully answering that is just as possible as meaningfully answering "when will Tobias die" which is something life insurance companies have done for a very long time.

e1g 5y ago
We're getting quite off topic here, but the "duration of a human life" follows a narrow, predictable, bell-curve-shaped distribution. "Impact of this feature" does not - it follows the power-law distribution. Life insurance companies can meaningfully estimate when you'll die, but they cannot meaningfully estimate the value of attending any given party/meeting/trip/conversation. Most of those will be meaningless by comparison to the few that cause an inflection point and make your life worth living, often by accident.
- kqr 5y ago
  The neat thing about these power law numbers is that you don't need to estimate whether we're talking 83 or 91. You just need to do enough work to tell apart 1000 from 10, which is often considerably easier. And note that I'm not saying you'll always know down to the cent, or even closest hundred dollar bill. Sometimes your best estimation is going to be "between zero and 999999" and that's fine. If you've determined that, you also know which of your inputs have the most uncertainly, and that might represent a blind spot of yours at an important aspect of the business. Or it represents a fundamentally unknowable thing. But then at least you know you're staking this part of the development on a fundamentally unknowable thing. That's more than many other know.