Do you ever find yourself in a design or planning meeting with loads of talking heads, all confidently agreeing on important points, where it's almost like the conclusions are just a matter of fact and should be obvious to anyone?
Yet you leave the meeting feeling unsettled, you sense gaps in the plan filled with vague arm wavey "someone will do something here" or a design that seems to hinge off a "decision engine" the details of which "we'll work out in the implementation."
So you ask around a bit, but no one seems to actually be able to coherently explain what the fuzzy stuff will actually be, what it will do, or even who is doing it.
"I need someone to paint me a picture to understand all this." you say to yourself.
Well guess what, they probably won't.
JFDI yourself, following these 2 rules:
1. Be positively unfussy about it
- boxes shouldn't line up neatly
- labels should definitely have typos
- use crayons if your kids haven't pushed them up their nose
It musn't be good looking
2. Do not leave gaps
Put your best interpretation of what the vague fuzzy stuff is into it. Even though you know you've got it wrong, just put it in.
Then present it back, to everyone.
Could be in the next meeting, an e-mail or paste it in the project Slack channel. Much like a 5 year old with their latest drawing, get it stuck under everyone's nose who you think might be interested and even those who are not.
If you are lucky, human nature will take over, an image that challenges a person's view seems to get much more of an immediate reaction than the written word.
The "someone will do something here" was "my guys will sort this with a perl script in 2 days" to the ops manager, meanwhile the project manager was talking to a recruiter about getting 4 contractors in.
It turns out the "decision engine" was assumed to be a 3 month procurement piece and integration with a SaaS offering to the product manager while one engineer had it down as 14 lines of code in an existing class.
The slightly less confident conversations sparked are great.
But the even better part is, having used crayons, no one will ever trust you with diagramming anything again and immediately someone else will take responsibility to draw your picture up in a "proper tool".
Happy days
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