Nail It Before You Scale It
Last night, a candidate I was interviewing asked an interesting question.
“Quantity or quality of tasks, which one will you choose If you have a tight timeline within a sprint?”
My answer was simple.
“Nail it before you scale it”
What does that actually mean?
Tasks that you have within a sprint is actually a guide for you to understand the problem. After you understand the problem, you’ll be able to find a solution for it.
When you have the solution, implement it with all the quality controls in place. The minimum quality measures should never be compromised. This is something that you always to bear in mind. Sometimes you don’t have the correct abstraction at first but that is fine. Solve it with the simplest effort you can.
Some of you might ask, “What about performance? What about maintenance?”
You can deal with those things later.
In an agile development environment, the solutions we use are assumptions. Sometimes it’s right, sometimes it’s not. And when it’s not, you’re going to scrap it. The effort becomes wasted.
When you spend too much time thinking the best way possible, you’re missing momentum. You’re missing feedbacks from your user. What you need to do is get it out fast. Collect the feedbacks. And then, if it turns out to be the right solution, you’ve “nailed it”. Now it’s time to “scale it”. Refactor it into something better so you can extend it better.
It’s not about the quality or the quantity, it’s about solving the problem.
Remember…
Nail it before you scale it!
