Prioritization
February 5, 2014Tom Conrad recently broke down how Pandora prioritized their tasks for eight years. It’s a decent, mostly offline system that relies on quarterly cycles and requires relatively accurate estimates of how long a task will take an engineer to complete.
It’s pretty far from the two week sprints many companies are doing now, but it’s not close to being a waterfall approach.
It strikes me as an interesting compromise between short changes and far-reaching goals.
Since starting at VEVO and continuing onto Viddy and now Fullscreen, I’ve been working in one agile methodology or another. However, prior to that, at Bootsoft, we did nearly everything waterfall, mostly because that’s what clients wanted. It’s given me an interesting perspective on one versus the other.
Insight from the article:
He readily busts the myth of “failing fast.” This wasn’t the environment at Pandora, with little time and money to waste. “There’s this motto in our industry that says fail fast and fail often,” he says. “But none of us can actually do that right? We have all kinds of constituents — employees, investors, users — they are expecting you to do smart things, not dumb things. So one of the first things I said was let’s not pretend we can just try things and some will work out and some won’t. That’s not winning, that’s losing.”
Both trying a lot of things while failing fast and having a thought-out plan and strategy have their merits.
One of my personal issues with failing fast is sometimes a task simply can’t be done fast. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done. Some features or updates – say, for example, an entire site redesign, can’t always happen piecemeal or quickly. Some products aren’t simple and the idea of the M in MVP is pretty huge. Coinbase’s case is a pretty good indicator here. They had to build a large system to even have the beginnings of a decent product.
Focusing on what’s in front of you reminds me of what football coaches in high school and college used to say. Lou Holtz popularized the idea of “WIN” which stands for “What’s Important Now.” The idea is to push everything out of the way that might be a distraction. Coaches cited girlfriends, social lives, video games as things that weren’t important now in the face of preparing for a season or game.
It makes sense when it comes to distractions and when you know what you should be doing. The problem is if, while working on what’s important now, you miss something that’s of vital importance in the future. Like, say, classes and studying.
The focus on small, fast failures in the immediate future often misses the large gains by going off in a new direction that has a larger scope and longer timeframe. Similarly, by throwing things against the wall to see what sticks, you end up with a messy floor of technical and product debt.
Just like most debates or dogmas, I think the best course of action is something in between. Focus doing as much immediate, meaningful work (whether it succeeds or not isn’t always the test for meaningful) as you can while making sure you come up for air, take a step back and really look at where you’re headed and if there’s a better course.
Keep your nose to the grindstone, but make sure the factory isn’t falling down around you.
