[tomnipotent]

No one gets it right, and it's just grandstanding to pretend that "deliberate effort" is the distinguishing difference between good or bad data models. Unless you're dealing with highly specialized technical scenarios, most software is written to solve ambiguous and nebulous business problems that even the business doesn't necessarily understand.

[Tabular-Iceberg]

> most software is written to solve ambiguous and nebulous business problems that even the business doesn't necessarily understand

Obviously if you're not deliberate about what problem you're trying to solve in the first place, no amount of deliberate effort will produce a good data model. Designing business processes must be done with the same deliberate effort, and also need to be constantly refactored.

[tomnipotent]

Have you worked at a start-up? Or in a field new to you, or new altogether? No amount of well-intended deliberate design will make up for domain expertise. Ever. The best you can do is mitigate as much future refactoring as possible, but eve than that's not always the best use of time.

> Designing business processes must be done with the same deliberate effort

That's not always realistic. Businesses processes solve existing problems, sometimes tackle new problems, but just like data models hindsight is 20/20. And just like data models, business processes are constantly evolving and never done.

[Tabular-Iceberg]

> Have you worked at a start-up? Or in a field new to you, or new altogether?

Yes, to both questions. And I still stand by everything I said.

In fact both cases made me form this exact opinion. Being all hand-wavy and haphazard about our business processes is precisely and without a doubt what killed it. The second example was from a big regulatory compliance thing that had taken the particular industry by surprise, again because nobody in that industry can be bothered to understand their own business processes, but cargo cult everything. Managers and domain experts would throw PowerPoint mockups over the fence and tell the devs to "just make it clickable and put it on the web site". I had to constantly fight them to get them to take their own jobs seriously. I nearly burnt out and had to quit shortly after, but we actually released on time and though not perfect, came out miles ahead of the competition.

> And just like data models, business processes are constantly evolving and never done.

That makes deliberate design of business process more important, not less. A culture of hand-waviness is precisely why businesses are still caught by surprise by things like regulations that they are given years in advance to implement. If you don't know where you are, you don't know what you're supposed to pivot to.