As if your project was a house…
Alright, let’s talk about code.
I am pretty sure every entrepreneur, investor, product manager or whoever interacts with software development should get this.
Your company’s idea is like an empty house; an empty apartment that you just moved it.
When you move into a new apartment there is infinite potential of what you can do. Of course it depends your savings, your income or simply your money spending style. For example, you can buy a second-hand pair of curtains, or curtains from IKEA, or something more fancy or expensive.
Now, your empty apartment is basically an “empty canvas”. You could give an industrial style to your apartment, or a modern, or a minimal with no curtains. You can just buy the first curtains you will find available or you can buy the ones you really like. Your money, your choice.
Also, you, probably as early as possible, need a bed to sleep. And then a wardrobe. Maybe a washing machine too if you have the space. A table, chairs or a sofa and most probably all of them. You might like to hang stuff on the wall or buy few plants. Forks, knives, dishes, a carpet, a coat-hanger, a coffee machine. Whatever, you name it.
And then you have a full house. Sweet.
Now let’s get pragmatic with what happens in software development.
Your company’s idea is like this empty apartment.
Your design skills or you design team is similar to your skills to match harmoniously your apartments’ furniture. You can put little effort looking for a piece of furniture e.g. a bed, because you simply need it asap, or you can sleep a month on the floor until you find a perfect one. You can also compromise to buy a table instantly or eat outside until you get delivered the one you want. Or even you can buy a cheap one and then throw it away later on, when you feel like replacing it.
But what’s important is this:
If you buy something there are only two options, you either keep it or you throw it away. Because you either want to replace it, it is broken or useless.
So you better get that sofa and the dining table you want, unless you want to carry them to the garbage (or pay someone do that for you).
Now, your furnished apartment is simply the materialisation of your idea, your design skills, your effort and your money to buy all these stuff you have now.
And that’s pretty much a company product. Every feature you have is like a piece of furniture. Some of them you need them asap. Some of them might don’t look good or fit well with others. For some of them you will prefer to wait a bit until you find the one and for others, if you are frivolous, you might waste your money. They might be difficult to replace, nice, ugly, resilient, fast outdated, fragile, extremely useful, not so useful, totally used, seldom used, fancy, modern, old. Anything.
And that’s exactly your features in your product.
You could have a nice, big, corner sofa. Difficult to replace but very useful and resilient as material. But for sure:
Every piece of furniture gets old or worn out. The same as software does.
You will replace a broken coffee machine with a new better one. But definitely you don’t need 3 coffee machines in your kitchen. Same with your product’s features.
And the quality and the material of your furniture? Well that’s similar your product’s software. It starts shiny when brand new and then gets old.
Now you might ask your company’s developers why have they slowed down to build new features in relation to the past.
Well, if you have a crowded apartment with furniture, would you find it unreasonable the cleaning lady you have hired to need more time to clean thoroughly your apartment? Similarly the devs need time to “clean” and maintain the code.
Okay. You got the idea. How do you live a better life? There are some questions to ask yourself:
Are you a minimalist? Do you enjoy buying stuff the whole time? Do you care your place to be clean or easily be cleaned? Do you like the area, your neighbours? Is it big enough? Do you want to save money to get that expensive new Macbook Pro or simply buy 5 new t-shirts? Are you willing to save money or totally fine to use your credit card or even take a loan? Do you own your apartment or pay rent? Do you like it? Do you even care?
All the above applies to your company. Be sure to afford the right amount of rent when you move in and of course it’s up to you on what to buy inside there.
And really, you can’t always live inside your apartment. It’s getting boring... Take some vacation or even relocate if you need more space…
What’s your “house”?
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I write my thoughts and coding experiences at lorentzos.com and tweet at @diolor.
I also run Hamburg Tech Jobs whenever I find free time.
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