It’s worth spending weeks on research before wasting years on a hopeless project

A lot of this is work culture. You can push back by trying to formalize the research phase. Saying "I'm working on the architecture/design document, we have some known unknowns regarding [foo] I'm hammering out" shows other people in the meeting that you are working towards their problem in a meaningful and structured way.

Ultimately, if the people in the org want to push the work to xyz instead I would let them. Maybe xyz is as good as they think, but probably everyone in that room will enter a slog project/feature.

When someone makes a threat your default behavior shouldn't be to back down.

> If you say that you are researching more than once, you are told "if you are facing difficulties, maybe xyz can have a look at it".

This.

A thousand times, this.

I find it's best to think of and also communicate the research phase as stage of the project itself with a report at the end as a deliverable.

At the status meeting, talk about the stages you've accomplished so far ("I've completed scoping, looked at these three third-party components, etc").

When the research stage is done, write up a research report with what you did and the findings and present it to the team. This gives the rest of the team visibility into what you're doing. It's also very helpful months later when you question "why did we pick Foo?" because you can refer back and know exactly why you did.

> e.g. scope the tooling, mental model, checking how well the third-party components integrate etc

This is very insightful - what if you first created a formal plan with a bunch of checkboxes so that your status audience can see a steady moving progress bar. I've been there and agree if you keep saying the same thing people start to get nervous.

A lot of this comes from hard lessons learned at the business level. If you're ultimately responsible for the success of a project with any significant level of uncertainty, you very quickly learn that any significant level of uncertainty means that things are probably not going to work out well. This becomes a knee-jerk fear response whenever any report says that things are not going according to plan, where the immediate impulse is to give that work item to someone who promises to make it go according to plan.

Very quickly leads to a race to the bottom where executives settle on tried-and-true strategies for driving revenue: give Google & Facebook lots of money for paid leads, spend a lot on salespeople to convert potential customers, nickel & dime them for everything, work your engineers to the bone to deliver the features that salespeople promise, and flip the company before the accumulated technical, management, and oftentimes financial debt kills it. Ultimately, if you want durable success, you need to take some strategic risks and invest in projects where you don't know the outcome before starting. But that goes against nearly every emotional circuit in how we're wired, so few executives can do it.

You need to better presenting your research. If you've done two days of research presumably you have 10+ hours of work to summarize.

"I talked to person A, who said we need featured X,Y, and Z. Then I talked to person B, who said they need A, B, and C, but feature C and Y aren't compatible with each other, so I'll need to reconcile that".

or

"We'll need to use third-party products A, B, and C. B has the API we need, but I'm still waiting to hear back from the C's vendor to see if they support API call foo."

When someone questions my work, effort or results from what I feel is an illegitimate place (ex: they're just trying to score easy political points) I find the easiest way to resolve the situation is to ask them to take on some non-trivial component of the work and share it with the audience at a future date. Nothing shuts down jerk disrupters like the potential of performing hard work.

I think a lot of famous programmers did good work because they had the freedom to explore things and iterate until they had something that was good. In my company you often have to explain yourself after a day or two so you feel constantly guilty because you didn’t produce anything.

But my best work was often done when me and others had weeks or months to play with things without interruption until we found an approach that really worked.

Speaking from the other side, my advice is to over-communicate, especially if you haven't built up a deep trust and reputation with your team and your manager.

Here's what your manager is worried about:

  1. Will the job be done well?
  2. How long will this take?
  3. Are you on-task, or are you stuck, overwhelmed, going rogue?

You can help your manager answer these questions by communicating these things:

  1. I have a plan, and here is the plan.
  2. Here is my progress in executing this plan.
  3. I have made these findings so far. I anticipate 
  these difficulties and challenges.

How this is communicated to the team, and your manager, depends on your team culture and workflow. But something typical might be:

  1. Two sentences in standup. Think through what you are 
  going to say, read a prepared statement from a sticky 
  note if necessary.
  2. A short email (<100 words) answering any questions 
  people have regarding your research. Use your own 
  judgment as to audience size and email frequency.
  3. A document or wiki page that is the final work 
  product of your research.

At my work we use what are called spikes to indicate that research is required and at the end of the spike you must have some documentation or a proof of concept produced so other people don't have to do the same research again. Unfortunately with your job it appears that the problem might be more that business relies on what they deem 10x programmers instead of creating a collaborative environment. They should be saying, "Hey if you're having difficulties maybe you and xyz can look at it together". If developer xyz comes to the same conclusion as you then business should can it at that point. If they don't then it could be that you were wrong and having another set of eyes on it helped out a lot, or it could be due to weird competitive culture where people want to take credit for things. I try to avoid this as much as possible by discouraging usage of the word I during any team discussions. It's almost always should be We. If one person fails, everyone fails. If one person does good, everyone does good.

> If you say that you are researching more than once

Then maybe it's just that you aren't specific enough?

You aren't just researching, so tell them what you did, what you are doing and what you plan to do instead.

I had to implement SAML quickly on our software once. It's a subject that needs quite a bit of research and ideally not much implementation. So here a timeline of what I would have said if you asked me an update regularly (which is probably quite close to what happened because we needed that for a demo pretty quickly and they asked me quite a bit of update):

    T + 5m: I'm still trying to figure out what is SAML. 
    T + 1h: I found what is SAML, but I am trying to understand how it works technically. 
    T + 2h: I'm looking for libraries to help me implements it because it's too complex to implements in house and not worth it 
    T + 4h: I found libraries, but I lost a few hours because it needs to be implemented as a login-module, not a library.
    T + 5h: I've found one that has potential but our version of J2EE is too outdated and it may not works. I'll need to experiment with it. 

At this point I gave 5 updates, I just did research, but never I said the word research. Each time what I said was justified and it doesn't sound unreasonable.

Obviously anecdotes are everywhere, but at my work I never had any issue saying "we will need 2 weeks for research on how to use this technology", if you say you need 2 weeks to assess something then you need 2 weeks. What, my producer is going to tell me that I need less time? Based on what?

I think your issue is that you're doing open ended research - if you don't specify upfront how much time you need to investigate something then no wonder you're being asked for updates after 2 days.

As a PM, for any big project I always try to get a good developer a full two week sprint to do nothing but whatever research he or she feels is appropriate after I have a basic framework of the functionality built out.

I'm convinced that 100% of the time, this saves time. The problem is it's tough to quantify the time saved from mistakes or mid-course changes that you would have made without having this time, and it's not easy to get execs to give up two weeks of time from a senior engineer who will really do a good job at this.

See also:

The Law School Scam (The Atlantic, 2014)

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/09/the-law...

A quote that stuck with me:

"A couple of months in the laboratory can frequently save a couple of hours in the library. "[0]

[0]: https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Frank_Westheimer

As someone who never went to grad school: how would a software consultant or freelancer approach this?

I dunno.. I would ask your advisor for the summary short cut. Literature surveys are kind of a waste of time. You really want to work in a space that has no literature yet! The problem with reading papers is you end up wasting time reading papers!

Yes, but sometimes research is just safe procrastination and more can be learned, more quickly, by jumping into the unknown and trying to figure it out.

This axiom sounds contradictory. Maybe if you add the word "probably" someone else had it. Because the fact is that someone HAD to have the idea first, so it's impossible to always apply this axiom. But I get the idea

Ff mobile says:

ottofeller.com uses an invalid security certificate. The certificate is not trusted because the issuer certificate is unknown. The server might not be sending the appropriate intermediate certificates. An additional root certificate may need to be imported. Error code: SEC_ERROR_UNKNOWN_ISSUER

But didn't name the issuer. Why?! Likely either a fringe issuer or self-signed cert

Which version of the FF do you use?

I don't think someone will be totally honest to you while saying if they are profitable or not. Before launching SaaS first thing I would do would sell it to someone even before the product is ready :)

You start with the root of the problem and work from there.

Know that while competitors might have it right, they also might have it wrong.

Talk to people.

I like the approach Seth Godin talks about in his book This is Marketing. He uses a 4 quadrant chart to plot two qualities of a product. Then plots where competitors fall on those two qualities. For instance cost and durability. Some competitors could be positioned differently say expensive and durable and perhaps there is no competitor that fills the cheap part of the graph. Its a nice way to visualize potential opportunities

There isn't a good way to know for sure that something is going to work, but there is alot of research you can do that will give you good information.

1. Cold email/linkedin message then speak to 100 potential customers. Attempt presales. You don't actually have to get presales, but that process should give you a good indication for willingness to pay / desired functionality, how people are currently working on the problem, and what language they use to describe their pain (quoting that back to customers is good marketing copy)

2. Build a landing page, run facebook / google ads, find out how much it costs to acquire an email address. Your real CAC will be higher of course, but this is a good starting point.

I'm a founder of https://www.saturncloud.io/. I started with #2, and found it cost 70 cents in advertising revenue to get a click, ~7$ for an email address, and ~$100-$200 to get someone to signup. When we started we were attempting a low touch sales model.

Since then we've started focusing on enterprise sales, because the willingness to pay is much higher. We did #1 when moving towards enterprise sales, but should have done that in the beginning.

With this approach you’re minimizing false positives (wasting time on useless projects) not false negatives (ignoring useful ideas) so it’s not surprising that some ideas you discarded are then successfully explored by others.

that someone got a Science or Nature paper out of it doesn't necessarily make it a good, or novel, idea