Late Changes

Some time back I wrote about the first time I experienced delivering value to a customer, and the impression it made on me, early in my Scrum journey. There was a second massive learning moment from that product that’s worth sharing.

I was a lead developer on a team building an e-commerce website. Part of the work was a configurator that dynamically built product preview images, based on the shopper’s selection of a fabric, a print pattern, a color, and a product — either a pillow or lampshade in various sizes.

Once the image of the printed fabric swatch had been assembled with the right fabric image and the right pattern tinted to the right color, the last step was to make it into a “product”. For each item, we had a “mask” image — white, with a transparent “hole” in the shape of the pillow or lampshade. We laid that mask over the fabric swatch, and there we were. There was the pillow shape, with our custom fabric image visible on it.

Nice! Done! Moving on!

But the more we looked at it, the more we noticed something funny. Sometimes the pattern seemed off-center, or incomplete. These were beach-themed patterns, and sometimes the seahorse heads would be chopped off across the top of the pillow, or their tails chopped off across the bottom.

The customer was an interior designer, and we presumed that she took more care…