Don’t Feed the Thought Leaders

Create an extended product roadmap and put those items at least a year off into the future “and as long as they don’t seem relevant, you can just keep pushing them into the future.” Perversely this plan made everyone happy – everyone’s feedback is on the roadmap, and now it’s all just a question of priorities.

Seemingly perverse, yes. Useful? Also yes.

Roadmaps have use beyond 6-week priorities. Sometimes you have to bring people along for the ride, giving acknowledgement to their voice even though you never plan to act on it.

The problem with all the bad advice was that it was unrelated to the problem we were trying to solve…

The solution to every problem can’t be the same

Boom!

The solution to every problem can’t be the same? Try telling that to a framework.

Uncontingent advice is what I think of when I hear the term thought-leader - someone has a single solution that seems to fit every problem. Whatever problem you face, the answer is test-driven development or stream architectures or being-really-truly-agile.

I get frustrated by advice like that but is it wrong? Unit testing, streaming architectures, agile are all good things.

It’s a good point. It’s usually good advice. But it’s not always pertinent advice given constraints like resourcing, time, ambitions, goals, etc.

One way to think about advice is as a prediction. Advocating for TDD can be viewed as a prediction that if you don’t write tests before you write code, your project will be less well-designed and harder to maintain.

Good observation. Advice is prediction. Do x and you’ll get y. It’s risk mitigation.

Software development is full of confident forecasters. We are a pretty new field, and yet everyone seems so sure that they have the best solution to whatever problem is at hand.

The proverbial “silver bullet”.

A great tool is not a universal tool it’s a tool well suited to a specific problem.

So what’s the takeaway?

The more universal a solution someone claims to have to whatever software engineering problem exists, and the more confident they are that it is a fully generalized solution, the more you should question them. The more specific and contingent the advice - the more someone says ‘it depends’… the more likely they are to be leading you in the right direction. At least that’s what I have found.