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Urgency is different that shipping small and often. Best team I ever worked on consistently shipped at a very high pace without needing a false sense of urgenc

Urgency is different that shipping small and often. Best team I ever worked on consistently shipped at a very high pace without needing a false sense of urgency. We worked hard upfront to cut scope and ship only features we thought were valuable.

marginalia_nu 3y ago
I think urgency is a management foot gun more than anything else. I've had bosses where everything was always on fire and extremely urgent and needed to be done the day before yesterday. The result is that you don't take what they're saying seriously, and when something actually is extremely urgent, you're like "yeah I'll do that next week when I'm finished with all the other urgent tasks you've given me" Beyond that, constant panic mode is also incredibly shortsighted and a recipe for crippling technical debt down the line.
- makerdiety 3y ago
  Yeah, we can use that World War Two general's (Patton?) important-urgent matrix. Any object (a task to get done eventually) gets assigned a vector of two components: important and urgent. Things that are both important and urgent will be in one corner of the geometric graph visual thingy. Things that are the complete opposite type of that both important and urgent object type are in the opposite corner, which is the corner of the not important and not urgent. The other two corners (important but not urgent and urgent but not important) beget the need for a measuring system, to make the whole model useful. Maybe encase the vectors in a Gaussian distribution where each object's vector's components are scaled, measuring, representative, or simply numerical values? Like, for example, for a new task to do, add a new object whose vector is 0.5 important and 0.1 urgent. I don't know what mathematics and analyses this setup will imply. So any mathematician or numbers nerd is invited to help further develop this abstraction.
rubicon33 3y ago
Great point!

marginalia_nu 3y ago

I think urgency is a management foot gun more than anything else. I've had bosses where everything was always on fire and extremely urgent and needed to be done the day before yesterday. The result is that you don't take what they're saying seriously, and when something actually is extremely urgent, you're like "yeah I'll do that next week when I'm finished with all the other urgent tasks you've given me" Beyond that, constant panic mode is also incredibly shortsighted and a recipe for crippling technical debt down the line.

makerdiety 3y ago
Yeah, we can use that World War Two general's (Patton?) important-urgent matrix. Any object (a task to get done eventually) gets assigned a vector of two components: important and urgent. Things that are both important and urgent will be in one corner of the geometric graph visual thingy. Things that are the complete opposite type of that both important and urgent object type are in the opposite corner, which is the corner of the not important and not urgent. The other two corners (important but not urgent and urgent but not important) beget the need for a measuring system, to make the whole model useful. Maybe encase the vectors in a Gaussian distribution where each object's vector's components are scaled, measuring, representative, or simply numerical values? Like, for example, for a new task to do, add a new object whose vector is 0.5 important and 0.1 urgent. I don't know what mathematics and analyses this setup will imply. So any mathematician or numbers nerd is invited to help further develop this abstraction.

rubicon33 3y ago

Great point!