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Sure, you need to balance urgency and quality, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't ever communicate about that tradeoff to stakeholders. Let me give a somewhat
by thayne 2y ago
Sure, you need to balance urgency and quality, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't ever communicate about that tradeoff to stakeholders.
Let me give a somewhat concrete example. Someone from business came to me to ask how hard it would be to fix a bug. It wasn't super urgent. The user experience of the bug wasn't too bad, a minor annoyance. But it seemed like such a small thing that they thought the fix couldn't take more than a few days. When I informed them it would take weeks at a minimum and more likely months, they were very confused, until I explained that a design made in the early days of the company (before I worked there) made this particular bug extremely difficult to fix. We would either have to redesign an entire system in a more robust way, or work around the limitations of the current system which would be faster, but still much more difficult than ot should be. And doing so wouldn't help at all with fixing the myriad other problems caused by this design choice.
And although I wasn't involved in the original design, I think at the time it wasn't a terrible decision. It allowed the company to get something out that worked pretty well, and helped the company grow quickly. But now that technical debt was slowing down other development.