By Joel Spolsky
Wednesday, February 13, 2002
“I don’t know what’s wrong with my development team,” the CEO thinks to himself. “Things were going so well when we started this project. For the first couple of weeks, the team cranked like crazy and got a great prototype working. But since then, things seem to have slowed to a crawl. They’re just not working hard any more.” He chooses a Callaway Titanium Driver and sends the caddy to fetch an ice-cold lemonade. “Maybe if I fire a couple of laggards that’ll light a fire under them!”
Meanwhile, of course, the development team has no idea that anything’s wrong. In fact, nothing is wrong. They’re right on schedule.
Don’t let this happen to you! I’m going to let you in on a little secret about those non-technical management types that will make your life a million times easier. It’s real simple. Once you know my secret, you’ll never have trouble working with non-technical managers again (unless you get into an argument over the coefficient of restitution of their golf clubs).
It’s pretty clear that programmers think in one language, and MBAs think in another. I’ve been thinking about the problem of communication in software management for a while, because it’s pretty clear to me that the power and rewards accrue to those rare individuals who know how to translate between Programmerese and MBAese.
Since I started working in the software industry, almost all the software I’ve worked on has been what might be called “speculative” software. That is, the software is not being built for a particular customer – it’s being built in hopes that zillions of people will buy it. But many software developers don’t have that luxury. They may be consultants developing a project for a single client, or they may be in-house programmers working on a complicated
corporate whatsit for Accounting (or whatever it is you in-house programmers do; it’s rather mysterious to me).
Have you ever noticed that on these custom projects, the single most common cause of overruns, failures, and general miserableness always boils down to, basically, “the (insert expletive here) customer didn’t know what they wanted?”
Here are three versions of the same pathology:
“The damn customer kept changing his mind. First he wanted Client/Server. Then he read about XML in Delta Airlines Inflight Magazine and decided he had to have XML. Now we’re rewriting the thing to use fleets of small Lego Mindstorms Robots.”
“We built it exactly the way they wanted. The contract specified the whole thing down to the smallest detail. We delivered exactly what the contract said. But when we delivered it, they were crestfallen.”
“Our miserable sales person agreed to a fixed price contract to build what was basically unspecified, and the customer’s lawyers were sharp enough to get a clause in the contract that they don’t have to pay us until ‘acceptance by customer,’ so we had to put a team of nine developers on their project for two years and only got paid $800.”
If there’s one thing every junior consultant needs to have injected into their head with a heavy duty 2500 RPM DeWalt Drill, it’s this: Customers Don’t Know What They Want. Stop Expecting Customers to Know What They Want. It’s just never going to happen. Get over it.
Instead, assume that you’re going to have to build something anyway, and the customer is going to have to like it, but they’re going to be a little bit surprised. YOU have to do the research. YOU have to figure out a design that solves the problem that the customer has in a pleasing way.
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