PRODUCTHEAD is a regular newsletter of product management goodness,
curated by Jock Busuttil.
true product managers wait #
every PRODUCTHEAD edition is online for you to refer back to
tl;dr
On a typical dev project, the reality is around 2-3x the original estimate
Trying to go faster when you’re already moving quickly has limited effect for a lot of effort
hello
It would be remiss of me not to mention that Radiohead’s album The Bends turned 30 last week, which means it’s now really serious about moving out from its parents’ house.
This week I have a couple of different perspectives on where the time goes. If you don’t come from a computer science background or struggle to understand why estimates from your development team are so wildly off, have a read of Dave Stewart’s visual breakdown of what he spends his time on while working on a project. There’s a lot more work before, after and in between “the work” that really adds up.
Personally I’ve found that estimation is barely worth the time it takes up with a team. If we need to do something, it needs to get done, so we might as well crack on with it. We’ll know soon enough whether we need to change course. Assuming it’s a known-enough quantity to even bother with estimates, I stick with orders of magnitude — whether this is going to take an hour, day, week, month, quarter or year. And for good measure I usually assume whatever is said will actually turn out to be at least one order bigger.
When experimenting with something new and uncertain, the likely estimate is a perfectly reasonable ‘dunno’ or ‘as long as it takes’, so I tend to favour time boxes and parallel exploration of alternatives instead. A day or five hacking around with something usually yields a much better idea of how hard it’s going to be, then it’s either go with the least bad option or reconsider the wisdom of your choices leading to that point.
Another perspective on time comes from adman Rory Sutherland who questions the assumption that quicker is always better. When is being slow a virtue? He notes that there are times when you simply want to check into a hotel quickly and without friction, and other times when you appreciate someone taking the time to show you to your room and making you a brew to help you settle in.
Do we all need to slow down a bit?
Speak to you soon,
Jock
what to think about this week
The work is never just “the work”
Last year I took on what seemed like a short, easy-to-deliver project, which over the course of a year turned into a kind of “night of the living dead” slog, and because of a variety of factors, had never been easy to estimate.
With the latest phase finally delivered, I wanted to conduct a detailed postmortem to understand why my perception of the actual work was so off, and in the process reevaluate everything I know about assumptions and estimation.
There’s far more invisible work than we realise
[Dave Stewart]
Are we too impatient to be intelligent?
… there’s a kind of analogy for the present day, which is that we’ve sometimes allowed the urgent to drown out the important. The short-term consideration drowns out the long-term consideration. But in the process, rather like that account man, we may also be ruining it for everybody else.
There are things where the value is precisely in the inefficiency, in the time spent
[Rory Sutherland / Behavioral Scientist]
recent posts
New technology alone is not the answer
New technology is not going to suddenly make all the challenges facing an organisation disappear overnight. Why? Because more often than not, those challenges are social not technological. Technology alone rarely solves ‘people problems’.
AI is neither a panacea nor a magic bullet just as digital wasn’t for UK gov
[I Manage Products]
What freelance product management is really like with Jock Busuttil
Off the back of his recent article for Mind The Product, Liam Smith interviewed me about my experiences in freelance product management.
We cover topics including:
» Should you hire freelancers in your product team?
» How to be successful as an external hire
+ more :-)
If this doesn’t put you off, nothing will
[I Manage Products]
Is coding in the open right for your organisation?
One of the design principles that underpinned the digital renaissance in UK government was — and still is — ‘Make things open: it makes things better’.
For this article, I’ve focused specifically on the ‘coding in the open’ part. I’ll cover how it benefits public sector organisations, and how — in the right circumstances — it can yield a strategic advantage to commercial organisations also.
Increased scrutiny keeps us all a bit more honest
[I Manage Products]
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PRODUCTHEAD is a newsletter for product people of all varieties, and is lovingly crafted from a significantly less leafy garden.