Its contradictory from an engineering lead to call for urgency in developing products.
A sense of urgency in shipping products/features is probably the best result for the agile mindset early stage start-ups. This is extremely challenging for the stable or matured products however is critical to their success.
Developing the right kind of product/feature sets is a three step process.
1.Solve: Identify the business’s problem(s).
2.Design: Pin down the best ways to solve it
3.Deliver: Build and deploy the product
The idea is to have clear implementation chalked out in the solving and designing phase to ease the development efforts. Conceiving the above , the true bottlenecks in the flow are solving and designing. So we have two choices, one is to widen the bottleneck by short-circuiting true ideation and pushing out all/most ideas to the delivery phase. The other is to not widen it at all and send only the most impactful things out.
Solving and Designing are the most valuable as this can potentially drain the entire delivery efforts and should be given due significance. Unfortunately, the prevalent scanning of move fast evaluates both solving and designing with the same level of urgency.
So how do we get there — to deliver the products urgently
Software has become effortless…in many ways.
Over the last few decades, software industry has been very successful in reducing the amount of code it takes to develop and deliver.
Much of this reduction has been accomplished by making programming languages more expressive, however the biggest gains has been the open source softwares . Most of the best known companies are built on it , these cannot be built today without without an order of magnitude more cost and effort.
These projects have allowed us to tackle business problems by leveraging frameworks/tools to allow us to focus more of our energy on actually solving business problems, rather than spending time building infrastructure.
So, what is the problem?
To most developers, software equals code, but that isn’t reality. There are many ways to build software, and one of those ways is through evaluating existing building blocks.
First is that experienced developers often hate the out of box solutions. Most serious developers like to write real code. Also we see many serious developers introducing complex frameworks to satisfy their own whims and fancies.
Second is that some folks look at these walled platforms and say “nope, not building my application in there.” though legitimate concern and needs to be evaluated the most.
Staying Focused on Simplicity
Again some serious developers to satisfy their egos pushes the introduction of the heterogeneous systems in the solution, while there are genuine data points to embrace it , however the longer term operational cost is overlooked.
Our answer to the growing complexity of doing business cannot be adding complexity to the development process/systems — no matter how elegant it may seem.We must find ways to manage complexity by simplifying the development process.
