I’m a month into mentoring our first intern here at Sly Trunk. It’s a wonderful experience - rewarding, challenging, exhausting. My jaw aches at the end of every day from talking about code and architectures, with the occasional pearl of wisdom thrown in for dramatic effect. I’m a self anointed mentor after all. I’ve seen Coach Carter.

One such gem is the oft heard “under promise, over deliver”. It is especially applicable to client work and setting expectations around deadlines. It’s a tricky thing to get the hang of but it is important to persist especially in the early days where your natural estimate padding buffer is paper thin.

So once I’ve let it sink in, with a pause for dramatic effect, I emphasize that it’s a 1-2 combo. The jab of under promising has to be followed up by the uppercut of over delivering. It absolutely has to. Almost every time. Being part of a group of engineers like Sly Trunk where the 1-2 is deployed on a daily basis leads to incredible relationships with happy clients built on trust and exceeded expectations.

Much to the chagrin of many engineers, however, clients know this motto too. They live by it. Everyone does. And when everyone knows the trick, it’s not longer a surprise when we over deliver, it’s expected. Expected. So the good teams out there strike a balance between the timing of the jab and uppercut so that the client is frequently pleasantly surprised and never disappointed. There is a lot of footwork involved in catching them off guard, but then not everyone is cut out for time in the ring.

It’s easy to lead with the jab and stand back pretending as though the date is the goal. “No subplot to this story, we gave you a date, why did you expect more?” Deployed too often, the client will find their sparring partner elsewhere.

Worse than pretending like you’re the only one that knows about the 1-2 combo, or pretending like it doesn’t exist all together, is the deployment of under promising in scenarios where doing so is just plain disrespectful.

I was on a call yesterday where a cluster bomb parachuted into a 2 month project. We have to dramatically alter our timelines and strategy and it’s all pivoting on a date a partner has to provide. The partner was on the call and said he’d have a date by tomorrow. The urgency was palpable, but no one blinked at the padded under-promise. You know, what if he got sick, or his hard drive failed, or a meteor struck on the way to the engineer’s desk who he had to ask for the date. Under promising delivery of an under promise.

What BS. When people are freaking out, get shit done. If something truly derails you, which let’s face it is unlikely, communicate the facts. But I took solace in the expectation of over delivery. Surely the path to his engineers desk wasn’t littered with hungry alligators.

But it’s tomorrow. I woke up expecting an email with a date. I spent my shower time wondering what had happened during that stroll through the cubes. I know there are 10+ people circling the site of the project bombing waiting for this date, all cursing his organization and rhetorically asking anyone who will listen “what did you expect?”!