I want to put a couple thoughts out to the Blind-o-verse, especially as its key demo is dev-centric. This comes after reading many a long post about biz ppl screwing everything up for devs (which deserves its own post). **Based on my experience, many devs need significant improvement in communicating persuasively and effectively with their business stakeholders and by not doing so are skirting a key responsibility of their job responsibility and negligently adding significant risks to a project/product** Whew. That was a mouthful. I was recently reading yet another post regarding biz ppl screwing everything up by releasing an MVP, not iterating on it, then trying to scale/enhance, and when that (obviously) blows up, throws tech under the bus. Sound familiar? Been there, seen that. Key issue: The collective definition and agreement of what constitutes an MVP vs V1-2 (aka iterations) is *killing* products & and teams! Not getting that clear in the beginning is *everyone’s* fault. Yours, too. At the BEGINNING of a project, if it doesn’t organically occur, you need to hold a product stakeholder team working session where these VIP expectations are fleshed out and agreed on. As in, YOU go--not your manager—YOU have skin in the game & YOU are doing the development. Also: Biz ppl need to see your face. It humanizes you. While you’re at it, pick one you don’t know & get a coffee with them. if you work in the same office. You’d be amazed at what building rapport can do. The biz ppl, wild ideas and all, need to be treated as both customers AND PEERS. They need you & should respect you as the bad asses you are. But you have to show them your stuff! I continually buz ppl feel like they don’t understand what’s going on technically & that it’s a black box anyway so they just blindly lumber on. They sometimes ask questions the outset & get blank stares or minimal feedback. This can bring disaster. It deepens the divide and bewilders me. Non-tech stakeholders are *counting* on you to speak & educate with simplicity. Convince them why doing x vs y is better-or at least lay out the risks clearly so they can make big $$ decisions. Just like your surgeon can’t speak all Medical School to you while explaining which heart bypass procedure is right for your mom. Join a speaking club; take a class—evolve away from any introversion that prohibits you from being a strong communicator and presence in the room. Hot tip: boil it down to money & risk. Money talks. TL;DR: Devs have a responsibility to, especially at the start of a project, demonstrate tactfully and persuasively the perils of putting an MVP out with no plans to scale & enhance speedily should biz want to proceed with it. Dammit, stop staring back blankly while product ppl shove both dates AND scope AND quality down your throats. Counter with what you CAN reliably do. Heroism sucks. Can TPTB do whatever they want after that “public” collective understanding? Sure. But everyone will know what’s up when some idiot tries to throw you & your team under the bus later if you deliver what is agreed upon. Just make it clear (and measurable!)—that’ll take a lot of the “opinion” and “perception” power out of the hands of evildoers. As you were.
I'm an SDM. I have been in meeting where we did exactly what you say: made the limitations excruciatingly clear. We put it in a document. Everyone reads it. Everyone says that they understand. Then a simplified summary is created by the PM which is a paragraph instead of a document. The estimate that originally had a +/- on it loses the +/- and the risks and limitations we spelled out detail are reduced to weasel words instead of specifics,and that "summary" gets distributed to broader stakeholders. Then even THAT get rewritten by the PM's manager, a director or Sr Mgr PM, who thinks it's too long, so the paragraph is reduced to a sentence or two, and the weasel words are dropped ("everyone knows there's risk"). You see where this is going. For whatever reason business people think it's their job to simplify things for their managers and in doing so they drop all the qualifications. Later they look at what THEY promised to some VP (a hard deadline with no +/- for a feature with no caveats) and demand to know why tech didn't deliver what was promised on schedule. At this point you send them the document that listed the limitations but to no avail. "Yes, but you were included in the communication where we ignored everything you said and promised X and Y".
Fuck, that was long.
It’s because we fucking jaded, man. We’re brought in last minute after timelines have been decided to give scopes for work we are just hearing about. Surprised scoffs are made when the dev swag ain’t 2 weeks but 2 months. So now we work overtime to cover your shitty ass job, just so product ships and you get the recognition.
I code.
It is not always easy to estimate the complexity in large system. For example, you might think the dark mode feature is pretty easy to implement since you only need to change the color. But you will only realize the complexity once you look at the code. It is like asking the doctor how long it will take for you to recover. Btw I heard Nike has shit TC
Isn’t that why we have “managers”
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Tl;dr is tl;dr