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patio11's profile
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11

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Patrick McKenzie

@patio11

I work for the Internet, at @stripe, mostly on accelerating startups. Opinions here are my own.

東京都 Tokyo
kalzumeus.com
Joined February 2009

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    1. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 4 Sep 2018
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      Note that this is really "heads I lose tails I lose harder" with respect to the instant customer need here. They have an internal target, you're missing it either way, but you set up a new target where hitting it is still a miss and missing it is just a double miss.

      1 reply 1 retweet 36 likes
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    2. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 4 Sep 2018
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      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.

      1 reply 7 retweets 51 likes
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    3. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 4 Sep 2018
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      "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*?

      1 reply 0 retweets 27 likes
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    4. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 4 Sep 2018
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      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.

      1 reply 0 retweets 20 likes
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    5. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 4 Sep 2018
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      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.

      1 reply 1 retweet 21 likes
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    6. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 4 Sep 2018
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      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.

      1 reply 0 retweets 18 likes
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    7. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 4 Sep 2018
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      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.

      1 reply 0 retweets 35 likes
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    8. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 4 Sep 2018
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      Don't promise dates!

      9 replies 12 retweets 102 likes
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    9. adriansio‏ @adriansio 5 Sep 2018
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      Replying to @patio11

      Patrick how would you answer to a customer asking when “will this be finished” or “an estimate on when this will be fixed”?

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
    10. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 5 Sep 2018
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      Replying to @adriansio

      Pick your favorite: "I'll ping you when it is ready." "Ask me on $DATE and I will tell you whether it is ready or not." "It will be ready when it is ready." "I hate committing to dates in advance because some percentage of the time when I do I have to disappoint people." "Soon."

      1 reply 0 retweets 8 likes
      Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 5 Sep 2018
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      Replying to @patio11 @adriansio

      You do not owe customers timelines unless you have (perhaps unwisely) committed to them in a Statement of Work.

      12:45 AM - 5 Sep 2018
      • 4 Likes
      • Avi Douglen Julián Limón Núñez Alok Dadhekar John Lee
      2 replies 0 retweets 4 likes
        1. New conversation
        2. George Stocker‏ @gortok 5 Sep 2018
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          Replying to @patio11 @adriansio

          So what do you do as an engineering team when your sales teams want dates, and in their words “if I don’t see dates, I won’t talk about the feature to customers because it’s not real until I see dates.”?

          1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
        3. John Kemp‏ @Kemp_J 5 Sep 2018
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          Replying to @gortok @patio11 @adriansio

          Then it looks like sales will have to wait until the feature is ready before they talk to customers. I suspect it's an empty threat though, because that will hurt their own numbers much more than it hurts engineering.

          0 replies 0 retweets 3 likes
        4. End of conversation
        1. adriansio‏ @adriansio 5 Sep 2018
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          Replying to @patio11

          Clear. Since it happened to me that some customers requested politely, was wondering what could be a nice way for not giving them a deadline. “I don’t like commit on dates as I never want to disappoint” based on your suggestion seems good. Thanks.

          0 replies 0 retweets 0 likes
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