“How hard would it be…?” – Managing Complexity Cost

Two switches
Two toggles – 4 states. Adding just one is simple, but doubles the states to 8. To maintain, understand, test, communicate this added complexity can ruin your product.

“How hard would it be…?” and “can’t you just…” are questions I’m just too familiar with. Leading the software department for our 21+ car2go locations and increasing moovel cities, I get to know all the ideas for cool new features, operational improvement wishes or backlog items we always wanted to realize. But it’s good not to jump on everything right away. On the long run, it pays off to thoroughly analyze every new idea and its potential implementation strategies to identify complexity cost. The goal is to not let this hidden cost pile up as technological debt which makes every refactoring a night mare and introduction of new features more complex.

In his article, Kris Gale (kgale) points out ways to identify and manage that complexity cost. He provides real-world examples, shows that the “value is in what gets used, not what gets built” and focuses on simplicity on product management and implementation. A good read for you and definitely for your colleagues!

Read more here: https://firstround.com/article/The-one-cost-engineers-and-product-managers-dont-consider

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