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A lot of the dangers of measuring velocity is if things change over time, if things slow down, these numbers start to drop - you could easily interpret that as somehow a reflection on the team going slower, or something... But you can't really say that. It's much more -- it's too chaotic. It could just be things are di... |
So I think that approach basically gets you better results, and you can still commit to some high-level -- you can still make good commitments that you've pretty confident you're going to hit, as long as you don't describe every possible thing and lock yourself into it. It's tough. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** You mentioned scope in your answer... You were saying have a good team, have a clear deadline, and define a scope. What is the scope? What do you mean? |
**Mat Ryer:** The set of features, the set of things we're going to do. Like, we're going to add comments to our tool. So it's going to have comments, and reactions and people's profile pictures in there... Now, if as we get underway and we realize we're running out of time, maybe we'll drop the profile pictures; maybe... |
\[42:08\] But see... So if though you'd said from the beginning we're going to release this and it's going to have your profile pictures on it, and suddenly people are sold on that idea - that's where you have then a difference in the expectations of what people are going to get. That's a silly case, with the profile p... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** So in the scope you define also importance, like priority? |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, because I think one of the nice things about having those velocity points to spend is it forces you to think "Alright, what do we want to spend it on? And what could we have later?" And it may be that there's like three big things you want, but you can't fit them all in, so you buy two big things, a... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** That reminds me a lot of what you said, Jerod, about the bucket... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Big, important... Smaller, faster... |
**Mat Ryer:** Jerod, do you have an idea of how many of those you'll get done in a week? Like, if you planned it out. Could you do three big ones, two small ones, and five small ones? |
**Jerod Santo:** I certainly could... Now, in the past I was doing contract software, and I would have multiple projects ongoing. And so it'd be rare that I would dedicate forty straight hours to a single client, and give them a week. I would split my week up across a few different projects. So I didn't do that very of... |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. So that's kind of like you're using your experience of what you've done in the past, and then you're applying that. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. That's hard-earned experience too, because I had a bunch of terrible estimates for years... And it's not that my estimations got better, it's that I became more aware of how bad they were. \[laughs\] |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Was it bias or noise? |
**Jerod Santo:** Both. Probably both. But it's a way of speaking with people about the difficulty, not just in the building of the software, but in actually the managing of the project... Because the one thing that we know right now is that we don't know what we're gonna know tomorrow. And so to set up something that's... |
And as long as you can keep the negotiation around that, and both sides understand that relationship, it's not too bad. It's when the budget and the scope are fixed, and the times everything is fixed. Now you're stuck to what your word was. "Well, you said it was a medium thing." "Well, it turns out I was wrong, and it... |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** That's where it gets to be -- it can be stressful for both sides, because it's their money, their time. |
**Mat Ryer:** \[45:49\] Yeah, this is why you need that trust. Honestly, if you don't trust the people you're working with, then you just probably shouldn't work with them, basically. The amount of extra work and the constraints you'd have to put in place to make it work... And you end up micromanaging, and... Building... |
Chris James messaged into the show... A friend of the show, Chris James. And Chris James says we should check out \[46:29\] which shows that you don't actually have to trade speed and quality; they're correlated. And that actually building high-quality software is the route to getting a good feedback, speed of feedback... |
**Jerod Santo:** Is that how you read every tweet in your head? |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. This is the only way to stop me from getting angry. |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] So that kind of goes back to my wrong direction thing from before, and I think you can be in the wrong direction on two fronts. On the product front, which I think is what you're speaking to there, like what features go in, how do we build them. But then also technically. If you're just tryi... |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, I think that's a very good point... You should learn where to spend the time. |
**Break:** \[48:30\] |
**Mat Ryer:** There's times to go slowly, and that's what experience brings. These are ideas that need to percolate a while; we need to let them settle down and keep thinking about them in the context of what else we're doing, before we just jump into it. And you do learn to them future-proof designs. One example I alw... |
So I tend to kind of be quite future-proof in my designs, because I like to give my future self options, because I know I don't have the answers now. I may know more later, and then I don't want to have painted myself into a corner. |
**Jerod Santo:** The other side of that, the non-moderation side of that though, is over-architecture, right? Because now you're generifying everything, and being ready for any circumstance. |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** And that can actually go against you in the long run as well. So finding that balance... I think your example is a great one, where it's a small decision that can be future-proofed, but it's not going to cost you a bunch of extra time right now. But we have that desire of like "I'm going to engineer th... |
**Mat Ryer:** Exactly, yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** You've lost the game right there. |
**Mat Ryer:** If it does everything, it doesn't do anything, basically, right? It's not doing anything, in a way. Yeah, that's right... Of course, you go too far with it... And I think there is kind of experience there, but there probably are techniques that people have come up with that allows you to sort of think abo... |
**Jerod Santo:** So I will refer to somebody else whose name is escaping me, but... |
**Mat Ryer:** Strange name... |
**Jerod Santo:** He has a rule... |
**Mat Ryer:** I wonder where that's from, Escaping Me... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, I mean - whose parents named them Escaping Me...? |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. Cool name, actually, now that I thought about it. |
**Jerod Santo:** Check him out, escapingme.com. I hope that's not some sort of weird website... Don't check it out. Jerod didn't tell you. |
**Mat Ryer:** \[laughs\] Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** There was a rule I heard, a way of making decisions... Because that's really what this is, like "Do I invest more time here to get it right, or do I do the quick and dirty thing to move on?" or whatever. And he says their team categorizes decisions into two buckets: easy to reverse, and hard to reverse... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** \[54:16\] I think I know what you described as the one-way door or two-way door, the way Jeff Bezos introduced it. |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay, that's who it was. It was my friend, Jeff Bezos. \[laughter\] |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** He's also in the US, right? You know each other? |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, we do. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Yeah, I agree that this is a good way of deciding whether to slow down and evaluate, or go fast because this is reversible. This is making a lot of sense. And in the book, the Noise book, they talk about taking decisions based on a hunch, so this is connecting to me, Mat, to something that you ... |
And another interesting example that they bring is sort of like a mini research that they did at some insurance agency, where they took the management and they said, "Give us some ten scenarios and we'll give your different evaluators to evaluate that. And then let's see what would be the price for the premium that the... |
**Mat Ryer:** Sometimes they are off, but you sort of coalesce eventually, as you learn from each other. But what did they find? |
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