What appears easy to you not be so trivial for your engineering team. Everything looks doable until you’re the one responsible for implementing the idea.
I have a system in production that generates a spreadsheet. A customer asked to merge data from multiple sources like Facebook and Twitter into the same workbook. Very reasonable request, but my team was overloaded with other projects with a higher priority. As an engineering manager, my time is not always mine. I could be pulled to another issue and have to delay the coding.
But I knew I had time. I could get this feature done in a week. The requirements were straightforward. I knew exactly what to code. This was one of the most well-defined project I’ve ever worked on because I translated the customer’s wishes myself. I wrote the spec!
Except finishing the feature took 40 hours across two weeks to completely debug, test, and verify results for production. Not surprising to anyone working in software development. I made the classic mistake of saying “yes” too quickly. Agreeing to a “simple” feature can take up so much time. I forgot how long implementation would take. I thought everything could be done in less than a week. I cut my own time by half. Oops. I recommend taking on small features as a gentle reminder building software takes longer than expected.
If I ever think “this feature seems trivial” again, I’ll reconsider my words.
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