Turn big unknowns into focused projects

We get a bad feeling whenever we’re tasked with working on a feature with a lot of unknowns. The project starts when someone says, “we’ve all been talking about making _that_ better for a long time.” But when we start to discuss and detail the project, a concrete definition of “better” is nowhere to be found. Better to who? Better in which situations? The upside of the project is unclear. The same lack of clarity exposes us to downside risk. We are free to include anything in the feature that can be justified as making it better. We don’t have the ability to say no to any idea, and because shipping is a one-way street, we’re committing to maintaining, improving, and expanding these new aspects of the product far into the future. In this episode you’ll learn how to think about these projects by going into a mode of risk management. Ryan and Chris also introduce a tool that they use to diagram a demand-side struggle and work towards a solution.