To be honest, I’m a bit spannered after Basecamp workshop and Reboot, and trying to decompress my thoughts isn’t that easy – but luckily I don’t have to, as there’s a ton of notes and reflections out there. Johnnie Moore summed up the key philosophies that touched me most:
“…taking small steps over theorising…getting out frequent, small revisions… and finally getting comfortable with “good enough”…”
I really got the chance to step back from several months of head-in-work-mode, and reflect on the things I’ve done badly, and where I’ve done well – I’ve definitely failed on the “good enough” aspect on my last project, where I drove my development team a bit crazy insisting on a feature I designed to work in an absolutely particular way, where really, they’d built it to be “good enough” – looking back on it, I should have recognised i was being way too precious. Sorry lads!
My current work has been involved in custom development projects, so I’ve been thinking of successful strategies to map (in particular) the BaseCamp team’s ideas to the non-mass product world I live in.
I think I do manage the other elements of their philosophical approach, although it’s sometimes tough to map ideas that are obvious and workable for ‘product’ teams to custom projects for a client…but these ideas are so important, and directly contribute to a better solution, that for new projects, taking these key ideas into the absolute start of a project will be my new approach.
So watch out clients – I’ll be setting your expectations that getting stuff that’s “good enough” out early, and then continuing to make lots of small revisions part of our upfront process.
Now to figure out how to persuade clients about the benefits of Jason’s Fried’s no functional spec mantra…