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by llamaLord 697 days ago
To be clear, I'm NOT advocating for premature abstraction, as a PM I live and die by "rule of three" when making decisions re: "let's just quickly solve this one bespoke need", vs "let's think about this more systematically".

But customers will never tell you all their requirements up front, and it's a PM's job when hearing a need from a customer to take the time to figure out if it's a single unique stand-alone problem, or simply one instance of an entire category, the other 3687 of which your customers are going to come asking for the moment they realise it's a category of problem your product is able to help with at all.
2 comments
Tabular-Iceberg 695 days ago
Perhaps it’s better to ask what will put the greatest cognitive strain on the developers.

Generally I want to program for the specific case first and hopefully make it so small that it doesn’t hurt to throw it away when the requirements change. But if the specific case means the whole team has to be burdened with a lot of really obscure hospitality domain knowledge, maybe it’s quicker and easier to build the abstraction.

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ttymck 697 days ago
Right, this is why a bad PM is worse than no PM. "Just build this one use case, and since it's so simple, I promised it by nex week". Instead of digging deeper, as you suggest.
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