Counter-intuitively I think the most impactful opportunity to "build it within a weekend" is in the context of large existing products where a lot of edge cases are already accounted for and you get the chance to focus in on one hyper-productive use case.
Bigger companies and larger user bases naturally have higher bars for security, user experience, business needs, QA, product sign off, etc. So actually threading that needle is nearly impossible in practice — but that is where the opportunity really lies — vs greenfield projects where you can build the happy path in a week and are left with a gigantic uphill battle to actually deliver value.
My emphasis is that this feature has the potential to be more impactful than people realize.
So basically: People over-estimate their ability in the way you're describing, but organizations with "brownfield products" struggle to achieve hypothetically possible outcomes of highly impactful features which could or should be "two day projects" and instead turn them into multi-month projects which might go nowhere.
It's a hard problem to solve for, but I feel like people think that when people think "what can get done in a very short amount of time" they usually think about brand new projects whereas I think the focus on existing ecosystems is where the opportunity is.
Counter-intuitively I think the most impactful opportunity to "build it within a weekend" is in the context of large existing products where a lot of edge cases are already accounted for and you get the chance to focus in on one hyper-productive use case.
Bigger companies and larger user bases naturally have higher bars for security, user experience, business needs, QA, product sign off, etc. So actually threading that needle is nearly impossible in practice — but that is where the opportunity really lies — vs greenfield projects where you can build the happy path in a week and are left with a gigantic uphill battle to actually deliver value.
You're essentially saying a feature can be built in a weekend, especially in bigger companies.
I definitely buy that, mostly because all the things that take a lot of time has been done before that!
Yes I agree.
My emphasis is that this feature has the potential to be more impactful than people realize.
So basically: People over-estimate their ability in the way you're describing, but organizations with "brownfield products" struggle to achieve hypothetically possible outcomes of highly impactful features which could or should be "two day projects" and instead turn them into multi-month projects which might go nowhere.
It's a hard problem to solve for, but I feel like people think that when people think "what can get done in a very short amount of time" they usually think about brand new projects whereas I think the focus on existing ecosystems is where the opportunity is.
Ahh, yeah makes sense!
And the emphasis on making it for scale also stretches the timeline by a fair bit!
Focusing on existing ecosystem is I feel more of an ego issue (problem not sexy enough, can't get promoted) 😅