Saved by Jonathan Simcoe
A Designer’s Guide to Parkinson’s Law of Triviality
Not sure if anything changed my approach to work and engineering in the past five years more than this passage from @Lethain, written in the context of staff engineering but much more broadly applicable.
Parkinson's Law dictates that a task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion. It is the magic of the imminent deadline. If I give you 24 hours to complete a project, the time pressure forces you to focus on execution, and you have no choice but to do only the bare essentials. If I give... See more
We have a core feature offering that is very strong. A small feature idea comes up that serves a subset of the market, but it isn’t too hard to do and it isn’t a bad thing, so we indulge. Repeat that thought process a hundred times and you have a cluttered UI, a large team, a slow product, and no obvious path forward.
Andrew Bosworth • Focus
the easiest thing to do in a product is add a feature. People new to design tend to see the world of product as a set of features to build more than an experience to balance, and they rush to add things until they paint themselves in a corner with an encumbered experience that lacks a cohesive purpose. Balancing and integrating takes a lot more eff... See more