“Bike Shedding”

Apparently in the midst of building a nuclear power plant, the executives at the energy company argued for days and days about where to put the shed for parking bikes. Pretty much the executives did not know anything about building a nuclear power plant, so they focused on topics they did understand, like bicycle parking.

As a product manger, we threw this term around constantly. Any time the conversation veered in a direction that seemed irrelevant to the task at hand, you could throw out “I think we are bike shedding here.” It’s like a dagger in an software engineers heart.

The term also subtly hints at executive incompetence.