[HN Gopher] Maximize value, not quantity ___________________________________________________________________ Maximize value, not quantity Author : iron_coder Score : 118 points Date : 2022-02-18 22:06 UTC (2 days ago) (HTM) web link (agileotter.blogspot.com) (TXT) w3m dump (agileotter.blogspot.com) | tpoacher wrote: | Nice article. | | I had similar thoughts on 'work better' vs 'work more' in the | past, and how it relates to Boyle's law :) | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30000296 | kqr wrote: | Since it's a common misconception: Value =/= cost. | | Instead of asking your developers "how long would this take to | do?", ask the business people, "how long can we spend on this | without losing money on it?" | | This changes discussions to become much more productive and | informative for all parties. Often easier too! | thomasahle wrote: | > ask the business people, "how long can we spend on this | without losing money on it?" | | Presumably you'd want the developers "How much value can you | create in time `t`", v(t), and the business people "how much | money will we lose in time `t`", l(t). | | And then you'll find the maximum of `v(t)-l(t)`. | | The problem of course is how much communication it takes | between the two groups to optimize this. And how well they can | actually estimate. | e1g wrote: | Asking that would signal a profound miscalibration in your | understanding of how businesses work (unless the only thing | your company does is sell your billable hours). | | For example, nearly every startup is losing money until they | become a unicorn (and often, well after) - this doesn't imply | that what their developers/ops people do all day is worth | either "nothing" or "billions". | kqr wrote: | But someone in the business ought to have estimated the | impact of a task, and it's very useful for developers to be | in on that discussion because then they can suggest | alternatives that are way cheaper but still worth just as | much, or that cost slightly more but would also be worth so | much more. | | And that's just the immediate benefit. It goes beyond that to | organisational learning and being able to calibrate past | estimates and get better at picking high value fruit rather | than just the low-hanging ones or the ones someone has a good | gut feeling about. | | But in my experience from organisations both small and large, | new and old, is that it's actually a huge mental shift | required to go from "this sounds neat let's do this" to | | - How exactly do we actually think doing this will help us in | the long run? | | - How would we express that in dollars to be able to compare | it with other things? | | - How soon will we be able to tell that we were wrong? | e1g wrote: | Say you're building an enterprise SaaS, and several of your | VIP customers ask for a button to "Export this table into | Excel for offline analysis". These customers are paying | >$100k p.a., and not threatening to leave or anything, but | it's a feature you think would be valuable for the core | product. You ask a developer to build this, and they ask, | "How long can I spend on this before we're losing money?". | There are several ways to answer, but few are polite. While | every business has some prioritization matrix/process, | rigorously estimating the "marginal revenue" for each | movement in the dance would add friction and internal | transaction costs that make the business not viable. | kqr wrote: | The nice thing about estimates is that you can make them | at whatever confidence level is sensible. | | If a precise estimation (which is what it seems like you | think of) adds too much friction and internal transaction | costs, make it at a different confidence level. | | So in your specific example, you might go, "I can't give | you the exact tipping point right now, but I'm 98 % | certain it's worth more than five days. So if you end up | spending four days on it and it's still not done, come | back to me for a more precise estimate." | e1g wrote: | As a thought experiment: even though it's impossible to | meaningfully answer "how long can we spend on this | without losing money on it?", imagine some omniscient | Business Analyst does the math and confidently declares, | "I expect this button to increase our profit margin by | $300k p.a.". Presumably, the developer now has the | commercial guidance to announce, "My salary is $200k, so | yes, I will create this button in the next 12 months, and | it will be my only job to oversee The Button as long as | it exists, and the business still gets to keep $100k p.a. | Great planning session." | | Estimations and prioritization systems are entire complex | fields we could debate. I'm not trying to do that; I'm | saying that asking "how long can we spend on this without | losing money on it?" will not be a productive addition to | most (all?) discussions with developers/product | owners/executives/clients. | kqr wrote: | How do you define "meaningfully answer" to arrive at the | conclusion that it's impossible? To me, meaningfully | answering that is just as possible as meaningfully | answering "when will Tobias die" which is something life | insurance companies have done for a very long time. | e1g wrote: | We're getting quite off topic here, but the "duration of | a human life" follows a narrow, predictable, bell-curve- | shaped distribution. "Impact of this feature" does not - | it follows the power-law distribution. Life insurance | companies can meaningfully estimate when you'll die, but | they cannot meaningfully estimate the value of attending | any given party/meeting/trip/conversation. Most of those | will be meaningless by comparison to the few that cause | an inflection point and make your life worth living, | often by accident. | kqr wrote: | The neat thing about these power law numbers is that you | don't need to estimate whether we're talking 83 or 91. | You just need to do enough work to tell apart 1000 from | 10, which is often considerably easier. | | And note that I'm not saying you'll always know down to | the cent, or even closest hundred dollar bill. Sometimes | your best estimation is going to be "between zero and | 999999" and that's fine. If you've determined that, you | also know which of your inputs have the most uncertainly, | and that might represent a blind spot of yours at an | important aspect of the business. | | Or it represents a fundamentally unknowable thing. But | then at least you know you're staking this part of the | development on a fundamentally unknowable thing. That's | more than many other know. | hgomersall wrote: | It's also likely a made up number. I find many people | think business is about careful planning and optimising | what you do for the best outcome. In practice, it's the | opposite - you do what hope will add the highest value in | the long term, then you scrabble about trying to realise | that value or change tack in response to feedback. Some | win, some lose, and all with varying degrees of severity. | dageshi wrote: | I mean yeah, essentially this is uno reverse carding the | business people with a question that's as difficult for | them to answer as their question is for the dev. | | They probably don't know. They're waiting for the dev to | throw a number out so they can gut feel whether it'll | work or not. | yakshaving_jgt wrote: | Oh, but isn't that exactly what they deserve? | dageshi wrote: | yes | mettamage wrote: | Don't you always lose money on it though, since at least one | dev should be working on it? | kqr wrote: | Not if it makes you more money in revenue than it costs in | developer time. | | "But isn't that obvious and the case for all developer time?" | Try running the numbers some time in your organisation. | You'll be surprised at how often things are produced at a | loss. | thunkshift1 wrote: | No you dont..Paying a dev is not losing money.. why hire the | dev in the first place in that case? | Juliate wrote: | Accounting-wise, it's very common that R&D and developers | are counted as cost centers, not profit centers. | | This is not necessarily a problem, unless the management | (and shareholders) only understands costs as an impediment | to be pressured and reduced (which is sadly also quite | common - and not necessarily false either). | chrisweekly wrote: | This varies so much across companies, let alone | industries. It was gratifying a few years back to realize | that annual revenue per engineer north of $4m put our | team in rarified company. I wonder how common it is to | examine that metric. While I'm happier (and earning much | more) consulting for a deep-pocketed enterprise where | enginering and R&D are treated as cost centers, I kind of | doubt it's something my current clients have ever even | considered. | judge2020 wrote: | But adding or removing developers doesn't add or remove | that revenue. If some exec wants to make a show by | increasing (short-term) profit, cutting developers is a | quick and dirty to do that. | VBprogrammer wrote: | I think the conversation is what is the expected return vs | the cost. Honestly, I'm not sure I'd really like to have that | conversation with the business people too often. Once a | product is complete I doubt many feature enhancement have a | decent business case. | kavunr wrote: | https://basecamp.com/shapeup seems to understand this at a core | level in a better way than scrum. | [deleted] | rgbrgb wrote: | Maybe dumb question, but what does PO mean? | | Edit: Oh, might be Product Owner (kinda like product manager) | which occurs halfway through the post. | blurker wrote: | I love this message. I think that most of the time it's best to | have an optimistic mindset about your team and trust that they | are doing their best, or at least want to. In my experience, more | times than not, unproductive teams aren't the result of people | working on the team being "lazy." It's usually externalities like | unrealistic estimates, poorly scoped tasks and various company- | driven disruptions to the team's focus. And if people are "being | lazy", it's usually still an indicator of other problems that | have destroyed their morale and a leader should look to fix those | things. Otherwise you are trying to treat the symptom, not the | problem. | [deleted] | [deleted] | egman_ekki wrote: | That is kind of evident. I wonder, though, when you get the most | value by increasing quantity (e.g. of iterations on a feature) | and how far you should push (even yourself, not just others). | | As a reference: https://jamesclear.com/repetitions | kqr wrote: | I think that viewing it as "quantity" focuses on the wrong | thing. What you want to maximise is opportunities for feedback. | Ozzie_osman wrote: | This is great and in line with how the best teams I've seen | operate. | | The only gotcha is that this only works if you have the right | people on the team and the right culture at the company, because | it assumes that people will do their best work without needing to | be pushed. Now, if you have a breakdown (have free riders on the | team, or a shitty company culture) this breaks down and things | deteriorate into the "push people hard and hold them accountable" | mode). | | Basically, operating in this mode requires a high degree of trust | from all sides. Trust can be self-fulfilling and easy to disrupt. | By pushing for efficiency you can easily turn your team into one | where you HAVE to push for efficiency. | juancn wrote: | This applies to every role you can have in an organization. The | better you get at working on the right thing, the less stressful | your job will be. | lumost wrote: | I always grow tired reading scrum guidelines. Everyone seems to | boil down to "people are overly emotional spherical cows", simply | trust the process and do your this small problem the sorting hat | of scrum has chosen for you. | | Anyone who's ever been on a scrum team can tell you that | engineers are not fungible unless you simplify the work to the | point that you are left with awful engineers doing awful work. | | Of course a Product owner will sometimes think about velocity, | they might be the CTO! Or a PM struggling with a team which can't | deliver at the pace the market needs. When does a PO ever live in | a world where they have oracle knowledge of value? Half the time | they are fresh bschool grads working with engineers and managers | with years in the company. | Swizec wrote: | The funny thing about emotional spherical cows and trusting the | process is that the first rule of agile is "People and | [delivered] software over process". You can and should do | anything to get working software over the line. Even if it | means breaking process when it isn't working. | | And you should always prioritize people over working software, | if needed. | | Working on a team that groks that part is quite nice actually. | You can go to your manager and say "Hey this thing is getting | in my way" and they'll say "Good god man why are you doing it | then!?" | beaconstudios wrote: | This is why I don't believe SCRUM is meaningfully agile at | all, and only exists so that companies can signal agility and | management consultancies can sell agility. When agile | development is fundamentally about fast feedback loops and | not letting bureaucracy get in the way of delivering, a | process laden model like SCRUM cannot be said to meet that | definition. | pydry wrote: | Nothing is really meaningfully agile because "agile" isnt | really a meaningful thing. It's something everyone projects | their desires onto. | | Fast feedback loops were never part of the core stated | values. | beaconstudios wrote: | That's just not true. See here: | https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html | | All of these statements are about optimising the | development feedback loop: | | > early and continuous delivery of valuable software. | | > Welcome changing requirements, even late in | | > Agile processes harness change for the customer's | competitive advantage. | | > Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of | weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the | shorter timescale. | | > The most efficient and effective method of conveying | information to and within a development team is face-to- | face conversation. | | > At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to | become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its | behavior accordingly. | [deleted] | clairity wrote: | > "SCRUM... only exists so that companies can signal | agility and management consultancies can sell agility." | | many companies employ scrum that way, but it's not | instrinsic to scrum. it really depends on where the locus | of control is. if it's firmly outside the team, it doesn't | matter which methodology you use, you're looked at as cogs | in the machine, as order takers. the locus needs to be in, | or at the very least, right next to, the team for any kind | of agile development to work. it's usually top-down | hierarchy that causes that kind of friction and expectation | mismatch. | beaconstudios wrote: | But if the team has the impetus to change the processes, | they can get rid of the SCRUM rituals that don't work for | them. Given that it comes with quite a few, bottom up | SCRUM will inevitably change into an actual agile system | suited to the team. | | I've never worked in a team (or run a team) where SCRUM | was kept wholesale by the team or anything other than | SCRUM sprints were chosen by management. | rileymat2 wrote: | I am sure they are out there, but I have never met a "balanced" | full stack engineer, unless they were equally bad at all | levels. | meesterdude wrote: | As a full stack engineer, I too am surprised at how hard it | is for people to straddle both. I think that only came about | for me, from building my own projects end to end. | clairity wrote: | people have different strengths and perspectives (the non- | sphericalness of real people) so it's not surprising that | folks gravitate towards an area of strength/interest even | if they can functionally work on the 'full stack'. as a | 'full stack' dabbler[0], i enjoy the view layer stuff the | most, but not so much with the js-dominant frontends of | current fashion. for that reason, i'm really digging | hotwire as a retro-futurist take on server-side-rendered- | but-reactive web dev (along with cousins like livewire & | htmx). | | [0]: product manager who likes to make stuff, in my case | rileymat2 wrote: | Yeah, I would consider myself full stack, but when it comes | to css I definitely tweak and pray like a hobbyist, not a | professional. I can change and implement front end as | maintenance or evolution, but God help me if I start in | greenfield front ends. | [deleted] | Mc91 wrote: | > Everyone seems to boil down to...simply trust the process | | In older days business would say what they wanted, engineering | would give a time estimate, and then we get to work with a | deadline both commit to - the waterfall method. | | With scrum, business says what they want when they want | (although preferably at the beginning of a quarter), but no | real estimates are done and thus no deadlines, work comes in | and is prioritized. This entails the micromanagement of daily | standups, stories needing to be broken into bite-sized sprint | length segments etc. | | Except we still wind up with deadlines, sometimes not even | communicated until the team is into the work already. So it is | the worst of all worlds - engineering gives no estimates, | micromanagement of daily standups and features needing to be | broken into small sprint length problems, plus, what was | supposed to go away but has not - deadlines - not estimated by | engineering, but handed down as fiat from somewhere in | management. This might not be "real scrum", but it is how it | works in more than one company that is supposedly working in | the agile/scrum method. | sodapopcan wrote: | Right, that's not scrum. That's picking aspects of it, doing | them wrong, and calling it scrum. Just because that's what | many business chose to do doesn't mean that it has no value | of done "right". For example, standup is not a "prove that | you got something done yesterday" meeting, it's about making | a plan for the day. Many businesses treat as such, but that's | just wrong. And toxic. | gedy wrote: | Agreed. The issue I've frequently run into is business side | thinking "we need all this, and by this date". Then trying | to apply "agile" on top of this assumption. It never works | out with that mindset. | boffinism wrote: | Am I the only one who would have preferred this idea to be | expressed as an idea rather than an anecdote that features the | author changing the life of a grateful acolyte with their | incredible wisdom? | cateye wrote: | Thought exactly the same. | | I was once walking on the street and someone asked me: -"Do you | know which direction I need to walk to get to a metro station?" | | I answered: -"Don't search for direction, accept the presence | to live a happy life." | | The person looked me in the eyes suddenly extremely happy. All | his fears were gone. He turned around walked away knowing he | was now a totally different human with a clear mind. | | He probably lived happily ever after. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-02-20 23:00 UTC)