Always liked Reinertsen’s post on reframing tech debt to deferred work.
“When we refer to postponed work as technical debt this automatically biases us to assume that both ongoing and future costs are more certain than they really are. This, in turn, causes us to overestimate these costs, leading us to be overly cautious about deferring work. If it is your intention to bias the decision against postponement, this is clearly the best term to use. However, if you are trying to carefully weigh of pros and cons of postponing work, I’d recommend using a more neutral term like deferred work.”
I know the intent is good (it is!) but this common notion that good design is a toolbox of fun little games really prevents the design function from getting taken more seriously. In the business world at least it ensures our seat at the kid’s table.
In my opinion this is impacted heavily by the average career length in the room. This isn't an age thing, but more of an expertise thing.
Once a person approaches and crosses that 10,000 hour mark, they no longer struggle to articulate their motivations and needs the way that a person at the 2,000 hour mark would.
I find this type of design playbook to be very useful when the average experience in the room is on the lower end. On the upper end of the experience spectrum (30,000+ hours), I've found it tends to turn more into facilitating a group therapy session. There's still room for activities and exercises but I use them sparingly.
I should also mention that I prefer to approach the extreme ends of the experience spectrum in separate engagements.
In the companies I've worked where it was taken seriously it had more of a Human Factors/HCI bent. You would come to them for accessibility and user studies, and stay for the pretty UI and design system.
while i appreciate the comment about games, i think it is worth considering the relationship between creativity and ego, and what happens when you take yourself, and your ideas, too seriously.
john gleese has a great take on creativity which i believe to be a fair criticism of what happens when you take yourself too seriously in business.
What about when you infantilize your employees and implicitly insult their intelligence by having them do exercises designed for 3rd graders? Is that the time to top it off with criticism for them taking themselves too seriously?
The dramatic reaction to doing group activities like stretching being viewed as an "insult" indicates that person has a very low emotional IQ. So yes, that's a great time to get them to stop taking themselves too seriously!
Also, look at you, Jesus, being the arbiter of who's got emotional IQ - the people who follow your exercise routines? People you like? I'm not speaking to you, but to anyone reading this: Anyone like the person I'm responding to, who jumps to assign judgment of some failing on those that don't go along with their program (or implies someone who doesn't go along with the group must be flawed or weak) is a narcissist and a sick control artist, and a bully who's just learned to use fancy language to make you feel bad about your absolutely 100% natural inclination to reject and call HORSESHIT on the metaphysical group crap they're selling. You, pal, just revealed yourself as one such peddler.
Actually, quite the opposite. People with high "EQ" are particularly sensitive to the discomfort invoked in individuals by hamfisted attempts at generating group conformity. But it's wonderful to have your emotional intelligence insulted while your intellect is under assault.
One way you know you're in a cult and being manipulated is that you or someone else is being singled out as an example of someone who's unwilling to adhere to whatever ridiculous stunt they're being asked to perform. The person asking them to do it is usually a psychopath using the oldest trick in the book: The ability to manipulate people by leveraging the innate human need for approval from the group.
And it's always those with emotional intelligence who are singled out for abuse. Of course, the psychopaths running the experiment also have "high EQ" - of a very particular and malevolent sort.
Rating: Cheap trick, poorly executed. 2/5. And not nice.
Fingers crossed OpenAI / Anthropic / etc do this! Would make working with these APIs for prediction projects that much easier.
Technically speaking it's pretty to force the model into an valid JSON-schema if you have access to the inference autoregressive loop and the logit activations. You can either force known areas of the template to a prefixed template, or fill in the basic JSON wrapper and force the model to choose arbitrary keys and values.
Imagine it might come down to how much of their usage is on generating text vs generating structured prediction payloads.
A lot of their value is turning unstructured text or user intent into the structured data. Even if the primary input is JSON, you want to explain what to do with it in words, and then get JSON back.
Why do you think they will be obsolete in 6 weeks?
Worth remembering that priority and sequence are not quite the same thing.
There's a useful framework called RICE where you evaluate/score ideas by Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort. Sometimes assigning numeric values feels forced so I often use it as "dimensions to be thinking about" rather than a literal scoring system. [1]
There's some great stuff in Reinertsen's Flow book about different sequencing strategies and when to use each. Eg, When delay costs are homogeneous, do the shortest task first. When task durations are homogeneous, do the highest cost-of-delay task first.
The author's framework-"you just start small and only add one at a time as needed"-and given example illustrate exactly the process that leads to too many metrics. Pick a few metrics, add another, add another, add another. If you have 5 teams working on a product you quickly end up in the 50 metrics scenario.
Too many metrics can be a problem but it's not the real problem. The real problem is choosing metrics without any regard for the decisions they're supposed to inform.
When you understand that the purpose of all measurement in business is to reduce uncertainty for a decision to be made, everything comes into focus, and you'll have a natural constraint on your scope of measurement.
That would be true if you didn't assign a cost to each metric that you add. It was when the cost of tracking metrics plummeted that this started to become a problem, as there was no external friction in collecting more. If you assign a cost, and respect that cost, you shouldn't continuously add more.
