Ruth — of systems & designMar 17

“1. You don't know what to build

This is the one nobody wants to talk about because it's embarrassing. Your PM hasn't talked to a real user in two months. Your requirements arrive as a Jira ticket with three sentences and a Figma link to a design that was approved by someone who's never used the product. Your engineers are making fifty micro-decisions a day about behaviour, edge cases, and error handling that nobody specified, because nobody thought about them.”

https://andrewmurphy.io/blog/if-you-thought-the-speed-of-writing-code-was-your-problem-you-have-bigger-problems

If you thought the speed of writing code was your problem - you have bigger problems | Debugging Leadership

AI coding tools are optimising the wrong thing and nobody wants to hear it. Writing code was already fast. The bottleneck is everything else: unclear requirements, review queues, terrified deploy cultures, and an org chart that needs six meetings to decide what colour the button should be.

Debugging Leadership
Show threadMay Likes TorontoMar 17
@RuthMalan 2 months? That's child's play.
Show threadGerardMar 17

@mayintoronto @RuthMalan Yeah, a place I worked at had feature requests that sat on the backlog for years.

The backlog tool was an internally developed system and I spent one hackathon seeing what lessons I could learn from all our historic data. Especially interesting was a graph I made: I drew one line for each major feature request. The x axis was calendar dates, the y axis was our ETA for that feature as calculated on each date - that is, how long it would take to complete, including the time to complete all the higher priority features before it.

The interesting result this graph demonstrated was that once the ETA for a feature was more than about 2 years in the future, it usually became longer rather than shorter as time went on. There was a kind of event horizon visible in the graph, beyond which planning was meaningless.
The honest and courageous thing to do would have been to remove everything beyond 2 years in the future from the road map. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to guess whether that was what we actually did...

(Incidentally, I believe the 2 year threshold was specific to that product and sector, and may be at the longer end of the curve. I would anticipate that this planning horizon would change according to things like the regulatory system, the type of customers, the rate of change in the market, and so on.)

Show threadMay Likes Toronto

@GerardThornley @RuthMalan Currently doing a tour of the go to market exec team to give them the news that I'm killing feature requests, to figure out where the objections will be.

It's been easier than I thought. I promised to not just delete the whole backlog this time around.

Mar 17 at 11:58pmWeb