All or something

David Heinemeier Hansson…

The world is full of ideas that can be executed with 10 to 20 hours per week, let alone 40. The number of projects that are truly impossible unless you put in 80 or 120 hours per week are vanishingly small by comparison.

This is of course nothing new. We’ve been playing this bongo drum for years. But every time I see people crumble and quit from the crunch-mode pressure cooker, I think what a shame, it didn’t have to be like that.

I once worked with a number of very smart people on a web application at a company (which was well past the buy-out/"visit from the IPO fairy" stage David mentions) where the PM declared that we should be in "death march" mode. The pressure was on. We needed to ship and we needed to do it soon.

Unfortunately the product wasn't clearly defined at that time. The initial vision was more hubris than practical problem solving.

We weren't pushing towards a clear finish line.

We were double-timing it to satisfy a PM's insecurities and anxieties.

Eventually the app did launch…Over a year after the death march started.

I don't know if the accelerated pace continued throughout that year. I left the company around three months into it. I was burnt out (from more than just this project—it was the proverbial straw). I never wanted to go to another meeting about anything.

I do know it wasn't a horrible application at launch. It worked. But it wasn't exciting. It had a serious identity crisis. It failed to clearly answer basic questions…Such as: What should I use this for?

Even from the outside looking in, our product wasn't long for this world. During development, two companies that made similar products were acquired. Eventually their apps were re-branded and re-launched. Ours was quietly shut down after a short and mostly un-eventful run.

This isn't an unusual case. I'd argue the vast majority of crunch-time situations in the internet industry have far more to do with individual anxieties than genuine deadlines. A chronic shortness of breath is a defining trait of this industry.

Sometimes things still work out in the end. Most of the time people are run into the ground while the forest is lost through the trees.

Either way, it never needs to be like that.

Via: marco.org | Filed under: balance  project management  anxiety