Coming from an engineering background sometimes I find that I have to work extra hard to gain perspective. This is especially true about the product that I happen to be working on at any given time. I think that I’ve actually gotten a lot better at it, but sometimes things happen that make me realize that I can fall prey to the common traps:
It isn’t good enough. Geez, if we only could have fit in these three (four, fifty, hundred – if we’re going to be unrealistic – let’s do it to the max!) features then it would be EXCELLENT. All we are doing is fixing bugs – there are too many problems! Oh no, look at the documentation, nobody is going to read this tripe, and if they do it won’t help them!
As a manager I know that always seeing the bad and never seeing the good can really hurt morale. People feel like things will never get better. However, invariably they do – or the product is destined to get canceled. The funny thing is that in my experience canceled projects tended to be the ones where people didn’t see the bad – they believed all of the hype about how wonderful and market changing what they were working on was. Maybe it made them complacent and it led them to put out a buggier product than if they were worried about how it would be received.
One thing that has always helped me gain perspective is to put out a Beta or an early adopter release that a few key trusted customers were able to use. Nothing will help set you straight like a customer telling you that the product is crap… or conversely that they were incredibly pleased by how stable it is and how they pushed it to its limits. Getting that kind of message back to the development organization is wonderful. Actually in either case it is. Better to fail (and learn from and fix the problems) with a trusted customer than an entire market. Also better to hear sooner rather than later that a product is doing really well. That can help motivate the final push to release in ways that management encouragement alone cannot.
