Late Vs. Early Disappointment

Focus On Early Disappointment

You should always try to work in a way that you’re disappointed as early as possible.

This may sound extremely depressing, but the alternative is that to have late disappointment, which is far worse.

Unfortunately, as a Product Manager, teams will frequently push you towards late disappointment.

Your developers will tell you they can work far more effectively by working in silos. “We need to do the back-end first, only then can we start on the front-end.” or “We must do a separate integration Sprint, because we can only test after the work is finished.”

Early collaboration is messy, uncertain and challenging. Working in a way that will result in early disappointment is extremely uncomfortable. It seems much easier, smoother and comfortable to hide in paper victory plans that coordinate all the different parts toward late integration.

Late integration appears as easy, certain and smooth, because you’re busy ticking boxes and everybody is quickly finishing their parts in the bigger whole. You’re creating the illusion of progress because you’re busy moving all the difficult and messy parts toward the end.

There’s only one problem: software only works if it all works together. If one piece doesn’t work, the whole thing can come crumbling down. Late disappointment is bad. You want to discover the surprises that matter as early as possible.

Aim for early integration, as then you will have early disappointment. Bonus points are for those who dare to go for a simpler solution where they even increase the risk of early disappointment.

If you are trying to do early integration and don't have early disappointments, there is a good chance you're over-engineering. Over-engineering means there is a good chance you could have aimed for earlier integration and earlier disappointment.

You can only discover as simple as necessary but not simpler than required by being disappointed early on. We don't like disappointing ourselves, so we build solutions that are too complex that disappoint ourselves in the future. And then we hide behind a facade: we simply couldn’t have known before doing the work.

But that’s a lie, we could have known, because early integration means early disappointment and discovering the problems that matters sooner.

Suboptimal gold-plating is much more comfortable and easier than silver-plating in a way that keeps our options open.

But by keeping our options open, we will have far more flexibility to deal with the problems that truly matter and we couldn’t know before staring the work.

And that’s why, early disappointment is far superior to late disappointment.

The choice is having discomfort now, or having discomfort later when we’re in a worse position to do anything about it.

We will have less time, and we will have made many decisions already that will limit our options and degrees of freedom.

Work in a way that you will cry sooner rather than later.