product management

A grumble about buckets

Sometimes developers limit the choices that are offered to their users as a way to simplify. This can be a good thing; I’m a big fan of simplicity.

However, this strategy comes with an important caveat:

If you’re going to force all choices into a few predefined buckets, you better provide buckets that match the needs of your users.

Broken buckets will not earn you brownie points. Or revenue.

image credit: Eva the Weaver (Flickr)

Today I was adjusting my 401k contribution. Here’s the broken buckets I saw when I logged in to the financial services website:

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A better way to put data in code

I’ve been focusing on esoteric features of language design for a while. I thought it might be nice to take a detour and explore something eminently practical and easy to explain, for a change.

Let’s talk data and tables.

I don’t mean databases–relational or otherwise; I’m talking about tables of data in source code itself. Sooner or later, every coder uses them. We build jump tables, tables of unicode character attributes, tables of time zone properties, tables of html entities, tables of multipliers to use in hash functions, tables that map zip codes to states, tables of dispatch targets, tables that tell us the internet domain-name suffix for a particular country name…

Depending on the language you’re using and the nature of your data, you might code such tables using arrays, structs, enums, dictionaries, hash maps, and so forth.

I think this is a mediocre solution, at best. Shouldn’t programmers work on funner stuff, like “traveling salesman” problems? :-)

image credit: xkcd.com

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2 Surprising Truths About The Iron Triangle

Project management 101 teaches that, when managing outcomes, you cannot alter scope, schedule, or cost (resources) without affecting at least one of the other dimensions. This interrelationship is known colloquially as the “Iron Triangle.” Sometimes we put “quality” in the middle to show how it is unavoidably shaped by choices on the other constraints:

Image credit: John M. Kennedy T (Wikimedia Commons)

Lots of Dilbert cartoons derive their humor from the unwillingness of the Pointy Haired Boss (PHB) to acknowledge this relationship. These cartoons are funny because they are so eerily similar to conversations we’ve all had, where someone wants us to deliver ultra-high quality, on a limited budget, in an aggressive timeframe, with a boatload of features.

It ain’t gonna happen, folks. We engineers are clever, but we’re not magicians. Triangles don’t work that way.

You’ve learned some good principles when you can articulate this geometry lesson.

But there’s more.

Truth 1: Scope is a trickster

Many well meaning managers and executives understand this trilemma, and they distance themselves from Dilbert’s PHB by acknowledging that something has to give. “I pick scope,” they’ll say. “We absolutely must have the product before the summer doldrums, and we only have X dollars to spend, but I’m willing to sacrifice a few features.”

This can give product management heartburn–feature sets sometimes hang together in ways that make slicing and dicing dangerous. An airplane that’s good at takeoffs but that can’t land is unlikely to be a commercial success. Good product managers will point this out, and they’ll be right.

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The Power of Simplicity

Most stories about zen masters, gurus, or other paragons of wisdom follow a similar pattern. The pupil discovers a problem. He or she struggles with it. The problem gets more and more overwhelming. Solutions are elusive. Finally the pupil goes to the master and pours out his heart, whereupon the master offers a pearl of insight that radically reinterprets the problem.

Seek the simple... Photo credit: departing(YYZ) (Flickr)

Seek the simple… Photo credit: departing(YYZ) (Flickr)

There’s a reason why this narrative exists in every culture: human beings need the insight that comes from synthesis, pared down to its essence. We crave the simple but profound:

  • Less is more.
  • Do unto others as you’d have others do unto you.
  • A watched pot never boils.
  • Freedom isn’t free.

The software industry desperately needs this sort of insight, but far too often I see us operate in the stage of the narrative where the pupil misunderstands the problem, struggles, and makes things worse. Continue reading →

Paying Off Technical Debt

We don’t get spam about how to consolidate our technical debts. :-) Image credit: Alan Cleaver (Flickr)

“Interest never sleeps nor sickens nor dies; it never goes to the hospital; it works on Sundays and holidays; it never takes a vacation; it never visits nor travels; it takes no pleasure; it is never laid off work nor discharged from employment; it never works on reduced hours. . . . Once in debt, interest is your companion every minute of the day and night; you cannot shun it or slip away from it; you cannot dismiss it; it yields neither to entreaties, demands, or orders; and whenever you get in its way or cross its course or fail to meet its demands, it crushes you.”

— J. Reuben Clark

In my recent post about how organizations forget technical debt, I glossed over some important details. When you’re in debt, you have an obligation to pay somebody back. So: with technical debt, who must you pay, and how?

More than just a code problem

A simplistic view–one that I’ve used for years–understands debt mainly as a deficiency in code. In this view, you pay yourself back by making the code better. Most discussions about technical debt take this view. It’s natural, and true, and useful.

However, I don’t think it’s the full story.

It’s good practice to borrow money from yourself. If you do things this way, you save a bunch of capital, and then you borrow against your own reserves. Paying yourself back consists of transferring money back into your own savings.

This is hard, and making large purchases this way requires years of prior planning and discipline.

A more common way to borrow is Continue reading →