We ♥️ Making Shit Up to Pretend We're Not Making Shit Up

Chasing False Certainty 🐐 Sabotages Value Delivery

Here is what remains of my cappuccino:

Please pay attention.

Don’t let the backdrop of an artificially generated Cinque Terre steal your focus.

Notice the coffee stains left in my cup of coffee. Soak all the coffee marks in, feel them in your soul and carefully examine their shape and contours.

Has the coffee stain burned itself into your memory? Great, then please answer a simple question:

How many baby goats do I have in my garden?

Yes, you heard it correctly. Baby goats. You know, the little creatures that dance and frolic around you when you’re doing baby goat yoga (yes, that’s a thing).

Come on, don’t be so fazed and speed things up, I haven’t got all day. I will accept nothing except else but an exact number.

Yeah… by now you’re probably thinking that I’m crazy and my question doesn’t make any sense.

Chasing Baby Goats 🐐

If you’re working in Product Management, every day you’re receiving ‘baby goats in the garden’ questions. Guessing how many baby goats are in the garden based on coffee leftovers is a daily affair at most companies.

We’re in the business of making shit up to pretend we’re not making shit up.

Here’s a real-world example of baby goat forecasting from Reddit:

The cost of making shit up to pretend we’re not making shit up is immediately obvious:

1. Slower time to market.

2. More unhappy team members.

3. Disappointed managers when our baby goat forecasts are inevitably wrong.

4. We commit to suboptimal decisions early, without letting real-world information about our situation guiding our decisions.

5. We become scared to adjust our decisions because changes are seen as bad.

You can’t tell the number of baby goats in my garden based on the coffee leftovers in my cup, just like Story Pointing everything and breaking down all the work will not provide better forecasts about when your work will be completed.

In fact, your forecasts will be even worse.

You’re locking in decisions and making assumptions at the worst point in time: before starting the work. Before starting the work, your work is clouded by the fog of beforehand - what we can’t know before staring the work. As we do the work, the fog of beforehand slowly disappears as we step in the fog.

If we ignore the fog of beforehand and make assumptions about what’s behind the fog, we introduce a new fog: the fog of speculation. For any new information that comes in, our judgement will be clouded by the fog of speculation.

Just like there is no information about the number of baby goats in the coffee stain, we make shit up to provide a number of baby goats. And all those assumptions are likely to bite us in the ass. As we can’t see through the fog, and we create another fog on top of the fog.

If you’re in a situation where you’re forced to provide estimates, switch to a much better approach than Story Points: Roman Estimation. With Roman Estimation you can still provide the comfort of illusory certainty, while wasting far less time doing so, and actually delivering stuff sooner.

Roman Estimation doesn’t tackle the root of our problems: you can’t discover what you don’t know by wandering in the caverns of your mind. The only way to to discover what can’t know before starting the work is actually doing the work.

And then when you discover what you didn’t know, you must adapt. The problem is that our ability to adapt becomes worse as we shift our attention to our ability to predict:

“The more we try to prevent sucking at predicting, the more we will guarantee to suck at adapting.”

There is no information about the number of baby goats in the coffee stain, just like endlessly Story Pointing and breaking down work, will not produce better information about how long it will take to complete the work. It will even produce worse information.

As described in the 10th law of Software estimation:

“Breaking all the work down to the smallest details to arrive at a better estimate means you will deliver the project later than if you hadn’t done that.” - 11 Laws of Software Estimation for Complex Work

Let’s Stop Making Shit Up To Pretend We’re Not Making Shit Up

In short, ultimately the question you should ask yourself:

Do we want make shit up and pretend we know the number of baby goats to provide a false sense of comfort, or do we want to make everyone uncomfortable by stepping in to the garden so we can actually count the number of baby goats?

Let’s stop making shit up to pretend we’re not making shit up.

You can’t tell the number of baby goats in a garden based on leftover coffee stains. All we’re doing is disconnecting our plans and predictions from reality, while we should be precisely be doing the opposite.

And that’s supposed to make us feel uncomfortable, and there’s nothing we can do to change that before actually starting the work.