Hey, Interesting points. And a memorable section from Thinking Fast and Slow.
I too think it is important to get feedback early and not invest tons and tons of effort into trying to never publish/deploy something that turns out to need further iteration or does not make sense altogether. When a lot of effort is invested into something and signs show up that it does not make a lot of sense, it can be tempting to ignore those sings or to continue because otherwise the effort would have been wasted (Sunken Cost Fallacy). In my view there is room for improving this not just at WMF but also at WMDE. It is my impression that some people at WMF and WMDE are so afraid of the community that they avoid cutting their losses when they should. Cutting losses by ending a certain effort is visible to the community and is something that is easy to direct criticism at. On the other hand if you just throw tons and tons of resources at this effort you eventually end up with an output that is not a failure if we ignore the cost in resources. That cost is less visible to the community and can be justified with "software development takes time and this project to add a button took the same amount of years as that other one that adds a checkbox, so what are you complaining about". This fear also leads to blocking risky projects even if the cost of failure (ignoring community apocalypse) is much lower than the possible upside. This kind of reasoning leads to subtle systemic failure with a huge cost, leaves the community worse off and makes me personally rather sad. I'd like to see less fear and more courage. If delivered value goes up, feedback is used more often and mistakes are corrected quicker, won't the community be more happy and more trusting? > - Management based on *outcomes* rather than *outputs *for people whose roles are strategically oriented (PMs, for example) I do not understand this point. Could you reword or elaborate? Cheers -- Jeroen De Dauw | https://entropywins.wtf | https://keybase.io/jeroendedauw Software Crafter | Speaker | Student | Strategist | Contributor to Wikimedia and Open Source ~=[,,_,,]:3
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