![]() Until we decide what few things are truly important, mostly unimportant things get done. Then, let’s recommend actions consistent with reality. What do we do with this completely obvious insight?įirst, let’s give it a name: The Law of Ruthless Prioritization So enough depressing talk about inevitable shortages. This rare event provides Skinner-style variable reinforcement to the next 100 requesters who now expect an easy work-around to their problem. And we celebrate the dev team’s cleverness. Very occasionally, we do find a small enhancement that fits effortlessly into other work. ECONOMIX RIGHTS SOFTWARES UPDATEWho’s going to tell our entire customer base that there’s no update this quarter?” TNSTAAFL. Product managers and Engineering VPs are trained to respond in EXCLUSIVE-OR terms: “Adding a teleportation option will absolutely delay version 6.2, force us to drop self-configuration, and probably push out three-factor authentication. If we’re going to insert that special configuration option that our VP Sales is sure will close a $28M deal with Deutsche Bank, something else won’t get done. There is no white space, no unallocated resource, no empty slots at the top of the backlog. Of course, development teams live in an EXCLUSIVE-OR world. If we make a convincing revenue argument or threaten executive intervention, they will admit that highly skilled developers are off reading xkcd – and could bang out this new feature before lunch. Our unstated thought: it’s not that the development team CAN’T do what we need, it’s that they WON’T do it. “My neighbor’s kid could do this in an hour.”.“We’ve gone agile, which gives us infinite capacity…”.“We’ve been talking about this for months.”.“How hard could it be? Probably only 10 lines of code.”.“We already promised it to a big prospect.”.Magical thinking is evident in the unconditional way we make requests demands: Unconsciously, we take an AND point of view: we can somehow do this just-one-more-small-thing AND still handle all-that-stuff-we-committed-to-but-forget-because-I-need-this-right-away. It’s urgent and important, so there must be resources to do it. Everyone with a request - customers, ex-customers, prospects, product managers, salespeople, partners, DevOps, support and customer success groups, and the development teams themselves - focuses on that next new idea. Of course we should staff up, go agile, apply lean discovery, invest in continuous integration, supply high-protein snacks, and have a dog-friendly office. (Need proof? Try saying these words to any executive: “We’ve found a little slack in next week’s sprint.” You’ll walk away with 50 dev-years of newly urgent work.) There’s no white space on the roadmap that we can’t fill with one more UX-clogging featurette. Development can never build as fast as we can dream up new things. More generally, there is an infinitely deep backlog, an unquenchable thirst for more software. Phantom deals emerge, analyst reports favor a competitor’s new feature, and some bit of system infrastructure is suddenly unstable. As soon as we’ve finishing wrestling and screaming behind closed doors to negotiate this quarter’s minimally viable roadmap, a stack of new requests and demands and executive overrides falls in. We all deny this, but it’s obviously true on inspection. ECONOMIX RIGHTS SOFTWARES SOFTWARE(Originally presented as a Business of Software talk.) Reality #1: Your development team will never, ever, ever be big enough. Four posts lay out a should-be-obvious set of truths and their matching laws. At the executive level, these should help us drive our tech companies in the right direction – to let gravity pull us where we want to go. So with some gross generalizations, here are a few core principles of software economics. While the two sides of the business communicate poorly, I think there’s something more fundamental happening: we don’t believe in the same laws of physics. I’ve spent a lot of the last decade with one foot in the engineering organization and the other with marketing/sales. Newton taught us that gravity’s not just a good idea, it’s the law. ![]()
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