Beautifully said! Not that we needed convincing. This was completely brutal and we’ve been brainstorming on how to not do that again. Here are ideas, including what @byorgey and @davitenio have suggested so far:
- Risk less money so it still pushes us forward but we can also decide to just cough it up.
- Commit to intermediate milestones.
- Commit to deploying to a subset of beta users.
- Beemind amount of time spent on the feature (maybe with the Beedroid timer instead of TagTime).
- Beemind commits with a certain hashtag (thanks @thunderbolt16).
- Commit to, say, 2 UVIs or Infras per week being tagged for the feature until it’s done.
For #1, in retrospect we should’ve actually coughed up the $810! Partly because of the large amount of money, it would’ve felt humiliating to not ship what we committed to. So that was part of the problem.
For #4, I actually did beemind time spent and got the spec in decent shape months ago (I was then daunted by the back end work requiring @bee’s big brain and flattened my road). But (a) it’s hard to beemind time with TagTime unless it’s something you’re spending hours a day on (hence me beeminding it so meekly for so long). And (b) @bee probably should’ve beeminded time spent on the actual implementation. A month ago when we hard-committed to this we would’ve been better off committing to spending some hours per day on it until it was done, however long that might take. That might risk going down rabbit holes but that might be better than what we did in October. We’ll try it!
Our thought process, by the way, was that we wanted this feature badly, yet, with the big changes needed in the back end to support it, months were going by with it not happening (even after it was seemingly mostly done). So at the beginning of October we decided it would just be too ridiculous not to have it as part of our 3rd anniversary post.