Is it poor submission titles? Is it websites that pop up a subscription box with no obvious close button?
Title should be: The one "feature" that will cause users to practically insta-close your website and not read the article.
One cost engineers and product managers don't consider
91–100 of 102 posts
Re: One cost engineers and product managers don't consider
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
As an engineer, my personal experience is that most feature creep actually comes from engineers. Marketing usually have the least idea, but engineers usually cause the "death by 1000 cuts".
I think the only time I've seen engineers add feature/code creep is when it's "filling the gaps" that others didn't think of. Many times ideas are presented to engineers in their unfinished format. It's often up to engineers and QA to find the areas where that idea needs to be fleshed out. Fleshing out an idea, I would argue, isn't feature creep but trying to make an added not suck.
Yup. When you've got a system that, as implemented, gets you 99% of the way to a nifty but unrequired feature? It's dreadfully tempting to go that last 1%. But somehow that 1% balloons into being something that you have to support and the UI turns out messier than you expected and yadda yadda yadda.
Re: One cost engineers and product managers don't consider
#93Brilliant article.
I have made similar observations in the past as well:
http://williamtpayne.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/complexity-it-ha...
As well the mistakes we tend to make when we try to deal with it:
http://williamtpayne.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/pushing-complexi...
Re: One cost engineers and product managers don't consider
#94For years, the two things that most frustrated me to hear from product managers were "how hard would it be..." and "can't you just..." It took me quite a while to figure out why I had such a strong, visceral reaction to these phrases. Oh, man. When it comes to my natural reaction to this, the words 'strong and visceral' doesn't even do justice. It took me a really long time to understand why I had such a deep-seated…
"Namely, the business units are so disconnected from engineering they don't even realize the costs of what they're asking for, and the engineers are so disconnected that they reap zero benefit from whatever business goal is going to be accomplished by this." I don't think it's just that they're disconnected - some of the orgs I've been in - they simply do not care , and never will, even if they completely understand…
I have similar experiences - it all comes down to accounting structures, in the end.
Re: One cost engineers and product managers don't consider
#95Would anybody speculate that the popularity of MVC and agile development has exacerbated this issue? I'm working for the first time on somebody elses code and with a group of develpers, and it seems like the answer to most problems is 'just add another model'. I stay away from that as much as I can, and try to make existing models fit new features and functions. Maybe it's just my current workplace, but is this a mor…
I'd rather have two simple things than one complex thing.
In the codebases I've worked on, a lot of the complexity I see arose from people changing the meaning of existing code so they could 'reuse' it.
Re: One cost engineers and product managers don't consider
#96[deleted]
Re: One cost engineers and product managers don't consider
#97Could not agree more. Very good paper!
Re: One cost engineers and product managers don't consider
#98For years, the two things that most frustrated me to hear from product managers were "how hard would it be..." and "can't you just..." It took me quite a while to figure out why I had such a strong, visceral reaction to these phrases. Oh, man. When it comes to my natural reaction to this, the words 'strong and visceral' doesn't even do justice. It took me a really long time to understand why I had such a deep-seated…
I've had a lot of success explaining it like this:
"Making something work is pretty easy. Making sure it never fails is the hard part."
Re: One cost engineers and product managers don't consider
#99Features are what sells products, the cost is that they make the product more complex (and add to the cost). Simple products are often easy to use, and document, which is one of the reasons Apple does so well.
Solving problems sells software - features are just one way of getting there.
Re: One cost engineers and product managers don't consider
#100For years, the two things that most frustrated me to hear from product managers were "how hard would it be..." and "can't you just..." It took me quite a while to figure out why I had such a strong, visceral reaction to these phrases. Oh, man. When it comes to my natural reaction to this, the words 'strong and visceral' doesn't even do justice. It took me a really long time to understand why I had such a deep-seated…
"Namely, the business units are so disconnected from engineering they don't even realize the costs of what they're asking for, and the engineers are so disconnected that they reap zero benefit from whatever business goal is going to be accomplished by this." I don't think it's just that they're disconnected - some of the orgs I've been in - they simply do not care , and never will, even if they completely understand…
It happens in tech companies too, especially enterprise companies. Project managers want to close out on their project and deliver to their customers and fuck anything else that's going on.