| >> 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. |