Surprises and disasters are usually synonymous in tech–but you can avoid rude awakenings by “slicing” tech work so thin that you’re getting real value daily.
When a friend drives you home, you look out the window to make sure you’re not taking any wrong turns. And banks “mark to market” daily so they always know the current value of their investments. It seems like engineers are the only ones we let take the jack-in-the-box approach to projects: they turn the crank for weeks or months, then out pops a fully formed feature or product–and more often than not, the result is a calamity rather than a success because there’s been no feedback along the way. The tragedy is that the liquidity and flexibility of software makes it particularly easy to measure value as you go, and to steer the project at every stage rather than being locked into an unchangeable plan. Insist that your engineers use “elephant carpaccio” to show you real-world, valuable increments of progress at extremely high frequency, as often as every day; the overall work may take slightly longer, but you’ll avoid the nasty shock of discovering they’ve been building something useless.
(Hat tip to Adam from Vienna for the “jack in the box” image!)
This first appeared in my weekly Squirrel Squadron email, which goes out every Monday, and was originally posted on 24th October 2022. To get my provocative thoughts and tips direct to your inbox first, sign up here: https://squirrelsquadron.com