a) It's a great thing about product businesses (and a bit less true of service businesses, and very less true of jobs) that you can cheerfully decline requests. b) It is probably better to phrase this as "No." or "That may be available eventually but it will not hit that date."https://twitter.com/sehurlburt/status/1037192349649174528 …
-
-
You might sensibly think "Aha but there is value in communicating dates to customers because that allows them to make informed tradeoffs for their own schedules based on the date." Real talk: they won't, but they will perceive themselves to have done so.
Show this thread -
"What do you mean they won't?" Have you worked at an organization? Where there are a number of people whose paychecks are all signed by the same person? Who break bread together? How often do *they* successfully align disparate workstreams with dates *given meetings to do so*?
Show this thread -
Your customer does not report to your boss. They do not see you in the hallway. They will not have you at their progress meetings. They will almost certainly not copy you in on every update to their Gantt chart.
Show this thread -
When you tell a customer you are slipping a date, they will not interpret it like the last 47 times it happened when Bob got sick, QA underestimated cycle time, or Jane got blocked by being matrixed to the incident response.
Show this thread -
And will they say "Oh, don't worry, I had avoided doing any work on the basis of your forecast dates, so this is ultimately no skin off my nose?" Nope. Nobody likes to admit that they took no action on what might resemble a relevant factoid. They *thought* about it, clearly.
Show this thread -
They thought about it, and then they wrote a schedule, and their thinking about it informed the schedule, and the schedule is now wrong, like every schedule which has ever been written but (importantly) distinguished because none of those other schedules clearly blamed you.
Show this thread -
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.