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The gyronavigator work becomes about the sailor we want to bring home; about the calibration technician we save time and headaches. What if the person paying t

The gyronavigator work becomes about the sailor we want to bring home; about the calibration technician we save time and headaches. What if the person paying the sailor doesn't want to pay to fix the slightly buggy navigation system, or if the person paying the technician doesn't care if they have to spend time on calibration? Then the reason to pay to do the work drifts to the "why" by default - its safer to navigate with a working system, it's cheaper to calibrate if there are fewer headaches. "Start with why" is about startups, and building products to sell to people, as much as it is about the reason to do work. A lot of the time you can frame that as a "who" to justify how you spend your time, but if you're building a startup you'll sell more focusing on the "why", because people don't always value the "who" if they're paying the bill but they're not the user.

dgb23 5y ago
One thing I like about XP is that it focuses on people who directly interact with what you build - programmers, users and domain experts. From the article: > Without putting ‘who’ first, you can’t create trust. You’ll only have politics and dysfunction. This addresses your point. If people in charge don't care about those who are affected by their decisions, AKA not taking responsibility, then you have a deeper problem. The article states that the 'why' should fall out of the 'who' and that the 'who' is someone you care about and work with. There is a very effective ideal behind that and anything on top that gets in the way should be subjected to scrutiny and not accepted as a given.
cestith 5y ago
Perhaps we should decide what to build deciding who will use it and why they'll use this instead of something else. Then when building the team, maybe we start with who we want working on it and then show them why it needs to be built. When selling it to the decision makers, start with why they should choose it, which is part of choosing who to target for the sale (apart from targeting for the use). The two really go hand in hand, but starting from one or the other in various circumstances makes a lot of sense. Now, if I was selling directly to end users, like home users, I could try to start with target audience (who) first, or start with why people would want the product first. If I don't know who I'm building it for or what those people need, I have to build something pretty general. If I have a market in mind before a prototype to turn into a product, then I can reason more about what niche I'm filling. I guess one can succeed or fail either way, and surely many have.

dgb23 5y ago

One thing I like about XP is that it focuses on people who directly interact with what you build - programmers, users and domain experts. From the article: > Without putting ‘who’ first, you can’t create trust. You’ll only have politics and dysfunction. This addresses your point. If people in charge don't care about those who are affected by their decisions, AKA not taking responsibility, then you have a deeper problem. The article states that the 'why' should fall out of the 'who' and that the 'who' is someone you care about and work with. There is a very effective ideal behind that and anything on top that gets in the way should be subjected to scrutiny and not accepted as a given.

cestith 5y ago

Perhaps we should decide what to build deciding who will use it and why they'll use this instead of something else. Then when building the team, maybe we start with who we want working on it and then show them why it needs to be built. When selling it to the decision makers, start with why they should choose it, which is part of choosing who to target for the sale (apart from targeting for the use). The two really go hand in hand, but starting from one or the other in various circumstances makes a lot of sense. Now, if I was selling directly to end users, like home users, I could try to start with target audience (who) first, or start with why people would want the product first. If I don't know who I'm building it for or what those people need, I have to build something pretty general. If I have a market in mind before a prototype to turn into a product, then I can reason more about what niche I'm filling. I guess one can succeed or fail either way, and surely many have.