| So... the example the author provides is super contrived. There's no problem with that. But I would expect a contrived example demonstrate the point without obvious holes. So I'm going to poke an obvious hole which IMO extends to overall idea the author is presenting. Claiming that a horse is majestic is not an "idea" in the "product idea" or "feature idea" sense. But let's assume for a moment that someone imagines a majestic creature in their mind. The person sees this beautiful majestic creature in their head. They can't wait to tell everyone about this beautiful idea. And when they decide to share it... they share an objectively ugly ass stick figure drawing... Do you see the problem? How one presents an idea is critical in validating it for a broader organization or society. If the person with the idea can't tell the difference between an ugly ass stick figure drawing and the majesty in their mind then how are you supposed to trust their vision? Their understanding of majesty is obviously disconnected from reality. Okay let's translate this to something more real world. Suppose you're a principal engineer or architect or whatever those people are called these days. You come in to work on a Monday and a mid-level engineer asks to meet you because they have a great idea. They were so excited that they even created a little demo over the weekend to show it off. The demo goes horribly. Every step of the way something breaks. The engineer can't clearly describe what the idea is as they stumble through layers of complex problems and solutions. The meeting ends and you walk away confused and mildly annoyed at having your time wasted. Perhaps the engineer did discover something interesting. But if they're not able to distill a demo into what makes their idea awesome then it would be irresponsible for you to blindly trust that the idea would work in practice. Now obviously in this context "idea" doesn't mean "use this function instead of that function and you get a 10x perf boost". That's simple. I'm talking about something more complicated like a new paradigm or way to architect your systems. My point is this. Presentation matters. It doesn't need to be pretty. You don't need to be eloquent. But when you present an idea it needs to do an exceptional job of demonstrating itself to peers. It's not the job of your peers to unpack your brilliance - that's on you. |
For my sins I'm not just a programmer, but I also need to (literally) sell my work to other programmers.
Over many years I've come to appreciate the idea of selling benefits, not features. Yes, utility is important, but ultimately people want benefits, not feature.
"saves time" is the benefit, "integrates with xero" is the feature.
Focusing on the selling _while_I am doing the creating, helps - I'll be writing the docs, and it's just complicated to explain, so I'll go back to the creating to make it easier. I'll be prepping for sales, and I find the rough edges, so it goes back for more polishing.
Selling ideas is the same. These days I can do what I like - the track record helps - but in the beginning I had to do a lot of work preparing the idea "for sale" to my bosses. If I can't sell it to them, how can I sell it to someone else. Equally, I had a bunch of bad ideas - most I filtered out myself, others were filtered for me.
I still tend to have a "big picture" in my head, of how things will plug together, but I seldom sell the big picture - I find utility for each part, make them successful, and at the end pull the threads together to show what I had in my head all along.