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Comment by SamBam | Hacker News Reader

> to convert unconditional advice into contingent advice, by encoding a priority

This is one of the most important things I've learned as a developer, and one that I thought I invented myself, before I knew about agile, by keeping a whiteboard near my desk with yellow sticky notes ordered by property:

"Yes, I get that it's a must-have feature, but where do you place it in relation to these other features?"

The concept of prioritization of features, and of saying "if I stopped dead at some arbitrary point in this list, would you have been happy with your order?" seemed so eye-opening to people at the time.

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Sometimes, the features are really must-haves though. Let’s say it’s march 2020 and your boss wants you to design a mass-market covid vaccine. You have three requirements: it needs to be safe for human use, it needs to be effective at preventing covid, and it needs to be possible to manufacture. If any one of these is missing, your design is useless. I think a similar dynamic is visible in many software projects.

That's totally fine - but people need to also be aware that if something is really a must then they have to be willing to spend adequate time and resources on getting it done, instead of assuming whatever resources they have on hand will be sufficient.

It's amazing the things that stop being a "must have" as soon as they have to spend more money.

It's a never ending struggle to get people to create this ordered priority. I always tell my developers to say

"if you do not give this an ordered priority, I will resolve items as I see fit. Should we need to stop for one reason or another, there is no guarantee of which have been resolved".

Often times that is okay. I also tell them to always take the ones they're most uncertain about first. Better to front load hard problems and uncertainties.

A manager once brought up "there are three levers - scope, time (deadline), money (people)", and while it's probably not revolutionary, it did stick with me.

Add more "must have" scope, and something else has to give.

I would argue that the scope lever should be set to 60%, time 60%, and money 35% for software projects.

Software projects are kind of like ovens-- if something cooks perfectly at 300 (temperature units), using 25 minutes and using 5 (money units), that does not mean it will cook perfectly at 600 temperature units using 12.5 minutes and 10 money units. Most likely it will burn.

Even there, drug companies often go through the features in a particular order. You start with a range of formulations which you suspect will be safe for human use, you test them to see which are effective, and then you hand them off to a different set of chemists and chemical engineers whose job it is to figure out how to manufacture the doses at scale.

Every part is necessary, but that doesn't mean that there isn't an ordering. Finding something that's easy to manufacture is pretty useless if it turns out later that it kills the patient. On the other hand, a drug that's safe and effective, but is difficult to manufacture is still a viable drug; worst case, you do what drug companies do all the time and charge obscene prices per dose until you figure out how to scale the process.

Then you do what the drug companies did: you hire consultants to do it for you. I did architecture work for one of the major covid vaccines for most of 2020 and that’s exactly what they did.

The overall tone of the program was “we basically have infinite money, just get it done and the government will pay us back”. So they had a fucking army of consultants to accelerate a process that normally takes 5+ years down to 6 months and they were building down multiple roadmaps just in case they hit a block on one of them.

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