| In my first adult job out of Uni I was working for a startup building a suite of tools for usability tracking/testing and alike. One of our main offerings was gonna be something similar to what HotJar is nowadays. We were busy with other stuff and I considered the requirements for the tool somewhat impossible ;)
So it got outsourced. The outsourcing company was a tiny local software house. They delivered on every single requirement in under 3 months. Despite my better judgement I was impressed. Until we gave ot to an actual customer. After some back and forth with initial errors (relatable) it started running on a small portion of traffic.
A week of running the tool on their website was 100GB of file storage and 100GB of storage behind postgress db. Utterly unsustainable. A few weeks later we had a "do what you want" sprint. I mean the engineering team decided (I know, different story tho) every 10 sprints we get one to do whatever we think makes sense for the product. So a brilliant new intern and I got to come up with new requirements to fulfill the same usecase but without the need to store colossal amount of data per visit. We wrote a new thing in 2 weeks and had a working demo. We used the next month to productize it. My initial.design was presenting user behavior as scenes, sort of like a comic book, instead of animating stuff to pretend it's a video. Over time product got that too tho. When the startup folded (yet another story) the technology behind that tool was the thing that got sold. Moral of the story? Whether you lie or not, bottom-up decision making can be pivotal to software products if you're lucky. |