Building a Common Language

Many moons ago, when I used to write software, I realized I was misinterpreting stakeholders, and they me. We were using the same words, but thinking of different things. Misunderstandings # Over a period of time sales, support, and product were getting annoyed with me for ’taking too long’ to build simple things, or ‘delivering rubbish’ too quickly. I was deeply confused. How could I possibly be taking too long on some projects, and not building quality solutions, at the same time? After (probably too long), I realized I was being told one thing, but through the various layers of engineering process, we were building the wrong thing1. It reminded me of a very old image, which visually depicts the differences in what a customer needs, and what is delivered to them. Specifically, when I was being asked by sales to build a quick prototype for a customer, I was building a ‘bells & whistles’ grade solution. And then, when I was being asked to build a ‘production’ grade solution, I was…