Two-way writeups: Coda’s secret to shipping fast
coda.io
coda.io
The main issue that remains is that voting on the main remaining issues causes stuff that’s obvious to everyone to float up, and stuff that’s only visible to few will sink. Say, nuances in technical feasibility. Or intuitions for the users’ perspective from hands-on experience. Or simply something that has been tried before.
Voting on this sort of itemized stack is often quite lossy and risks putting important aspects behind a barrier of whether the company is lucky enough that the person who sees certain parts of the core issues is able to express that view on the fly.
The subtle things that aren’t obviously a problem are very often what defines progress in reality.
This is even before considering social aspects such as popularity, charm, the innate desire to please others, or personal friction.
To put another way. Like… why voting? What does voting capture? What is the meaning of the amount of votes from across the team for an entry of a particular list of definitions of the reality of work at the moment? – And this way of framing it, the way I’m asking a pretty demanding question – it isn’t very, mm, let’s say harmonious? And probably wouldn’t get many votes. :’)
It is interesting to think why the piece gave me that sense of distrust. Since they are a productivity company, it's not surprising that they might have insights into productivity, and also that they might orient their product development to enable those insights.
Maybe if they had been more upfront at the beginning of the article as to what it was, I wouldn't have had the sense that I was bamboozled into reading a long pitch when I thought I was reading an impartial blog post.