Do you have an ETA? Do you have an SLA? I’m not talking about company-wide time-to-respond options, I’m talking about your own internal options that govern your own operations and how you respond to people. Is it a knee-jerk response? Is it last minute? Is it immediate acknowledgment? How do you respond and how do you want to respond is what matters and it’s all up to you.
What is your line in stand? The hill you’ll die on. Your last straw. It doesn’t (and shouldn’t) be as dramatic as any of the above, but knowing your threshold, your limit, is what it will help you when things go wrong. When things are going bad, we enter into the “one more” syndrome – where incrementally “one more” thing will not hurt us until one day we wake up burnt out and overloaded. Know…
You don’t need everything, everywhere all at once. You don’t need to go full waterfall. You do need to know what you’re building. Why you’re building it. And who you’re building it for. If you’re not answering those 3 questions and keep trickling out the information as you receive, what you’ll end up with is a trickled-down app that kind of does what you want, for some of the people but they don’t know why…
You don’t pick your team. Your team picks their leader. And maybe that will be you, whether in title or not.
You purchase a product. You customize it. You customize it some more. You keep tinkering and tweaking until there is nothing left of the original save for your customizations. You now have a mess of an upgrade on your hands. You now have time spent figuring out why you had to customize it to the nth degree. If you’re having to customize something you bought that much, it might be a sign, you need to…