> • Find and resolve open questions before starting the work.
Touching, not solving just touching, on open questions sometimes exposes a fountain of business context that was hidden, so doing that early I, personally, find helpful in the understanding & exploring phase of a project.
But resolve all open questions before starting? What does resolve mean? We don't have perfect knowledge of the future and, just like generative AI, we are quite capable of imagining arms growing where there are actually legs, or boogiemen that don't exist at all, and the only effective solution to that is to get closer to key points. Expecting to have answers to every question from afar is like turning up the realism dial in generative AI; it will make textures more realistic but it will still put limbs in the wrong places. If "resolve" means deciding whether the question is important or not, and if important then making sure that we are close enough to it to understand and decide it then, yes, I agree. There is nothing as useful to clarifying a dream as jumping in to the darkest parts, without inhibitions or prejudice, for a very short time, just enough to get a taste. Maybe you will find out that the boogieman is not real. The quickest way of understanding the future can be to step into it. And let's not spend a huge amount of time planning solutions to questions that are likely to be details; like Mein Herr making a map to a scale of 1:1 only to find that the world itself is a better map than the hyper-detailed map and so giving up on map making altogether. Time spent planning is also time. Better: Agree with the customer whether questions are important for the MVP, which are details and which can be ignored altogether.
I, personally, like to separate exploration from trying to decide whether questions are important. I am not good at exploring and filtering at the same time. When exploring my mind is open, excitable and absorbs all kinds of stimuli, in the filtering stage it is cooler, more closed, more judgemental, and far less efficient at absorbing information.
Love it. Regarding:
> • Find and resolve open questions before starting the work.
Touching, not solving just touching, on open questions sometimes exposes a fountain of business context that was hidden, so doing that early I, personally, find helpful in the understanding & exploring phase of a project.
But resolve all open questions before starting? What does resolve mean? We don't have perfect knowledge of the future and, just like generative AI, we are quite capable of imagining arms growing where there are actually legs, or boogiemen that don't exist at all, and the only effective solution to that is to get closer to key points. Expecting to have answers to every question from afar is like turning up the realism dial in generative AI; it will make textures more realistic but it will still put limbs in the wrong places. If "resolve" means deciding whether the question is important or not, and if important then making sure that we are close enough to it to understand and decide it then, yes, I agree. There is nothing as useful to clarifying a dream as jumping in to the darkest parts, without inhibitions or prejudice, for a very short time, just enough to get a taste. Maybe you will find out that the boogieman is not real. The quickest way of understanding the future can be to step into it. And let's not spend a huge amount of time planning solutions to questions that are likely to be details; like Mein Herr making a map to a scale of 1:1 only to find that the world itself is a better map than the hyper-detailed map and so giving up on map making altogether. Time spent planning is also time. Better: Agree with the customer whether questions are important for the MVP, which are details and which can be ignored altogether.
I, personally, like to separate exploration from trying to decide whether questions are important. I am not good at exploring and filtering at the same time. When exploring my mind is open, excitable and absorbs all kinds of stimuli, in the filtering stage it is cooler, more closed, more judgemental, and far less efficient at absorbing information.
Bib:
- Mein Herr on map making: https://people.duke.edu/~ng46/topics/lewis-carroll.htm