You can't deliver anything without ruthless prioritization
Imagine planning a trip from Tennessee to New York. You want to make the entire trip in a day, you hate flying, and you refuse to be crammed into a train. (Picky much?)
Trying to optimize for all of the requirements at once ends up making the entire trip impossible. If the trip is worth making, you’ll eventually concede on one (or more) of the requirements.
This concession, this trade-off, is how you focus on what matters to bring your ideas into reality.
You may be interested to hear that software projects are just like trips from Tennessee to New York. There’s a whole lot of “unknown” between home and Lady Liberty. Attempting to plan for and accommodate every possible requirement will just result in endlessly analyzing the situation and never doing the damn thing.
In a perfect world, time wouldn’t matter and we could build software Just Right™. In reality, doing anything worthwhile demands ruthless prioritization and focus. In a discipline like software, filled with infinite possibilities, ruthlessly cutting things out is the only way to deliver anything of value.
A good software team will outline the trade-offs and risks within their project proposal, perhaps even providing additional options to tailor the trade-offs to your preference and budget.
A poor software team will promise the world, but you’ll be lucky if they deliver a postcard from New Jersey.
A project without trade-offs will blow its deadline. As surely as a ball thrown up comes down, an unbounded project cannot fit within an arbitrary boundary. Of course, this doesn’t affect teams that bill hourly…
🔑 Key Takeaways
Trade-offs are the magic sauce. Without them, you cannot scope a project small enough to deliver anything useful in a reasonable time frame.
A good software team will help you understand available trade-offs associated with your idea and craft a project proposal that will suit your timeline and budget.