Today the entire development team spent literally the whole day arguing about new features. Not that this is a bad thing, we’re pretty sure we’ve got all the core stuff covered and our bug count has just about collapsed under the weight of a few late nights of fixing, so essentially the timing is perfect.
Now everyone in the room knows their stuff, they’ve all cut their teeth working for some pretty big organisations and are quite rightly very well respected. However, what struck me was not the strength of their opinions or their diversity, everybody was pretty much on page, it was simply the amount of effort each put into their justification.
Let me add some clarity we used a “How much would you want this feature?” methodology, thank you Joel, where everybody says what they would be willing to pay for each feature. The point being it’s what you would pay not anyone else, not the customer, not a reviewer and it’s not done in front of any form of Jury.
Yet instead of being a quick way to prioritise features each developer announced a value and then proceeded to give a full justification. No matter how many times we said no need to justify it, no matter that not once did anyone ever disagree, they just could not help but provide a whole raft of evidence for their own opinions.
At first this frustrated me, it felt like we were getting bogged down, it felt so unnecessary and really I just didn’t get it, but not now. In fact it’s obvious, developers by nature are logical, they are methodical and they spend a whole lot of their time just trying to prove that something works. Stating an opinion without justification is as taboo to them as releasing code without a unit test and to be honest I think I like it this way.
This once frustrating observation now tells me that a developer cares enough about their opinion to explain how they got there (even if at first I didn’t care enough to listen), it tells me when they release code they’ve taken care to prove it works and it tells me when anyone asks about our product they care enough to explain just why they are so proud of it. After all, you can’t build customer advocacy if you don’t have it within your team and this tells me we most certainly do!