Convincing my team members that our current approach is flawed.
Please give me a moment and hear me out. I think our approach is flawed.
I suspect at least four of us signed up for this hard post partly because we wanted to challenge ourselves and demonstrate our skills. There is nothing wrong with that, but I think it is affecting how we approach the work.
Let me explain why. Do we have an agenda for today? No, because we donât know what needs to be done next. Everyone is speaking up with whatever comes to mind, and this simply does not work for a problem of this complexity, even when I understand your hard effort into prepartion.
Every task has a set of prerequisites. Their relationships form something like a directed graph. Technically, we should never really be lost about what to do next. We work through the prerequisites in topological order.
I think this is not happening because we are inexperienced with this kind of problem, which is totally not anyoneâs fault. But we need to use a different approach from how we normally tackle individual tasks.
As challengers, we donât yet know all the elements we need to cover well enough to approach this purely bottom-up. Instead, we should first capture the broad picture and establish a temporary structure for what needs to be covered.
In other words, we need to shift from bottom-up to top-down.
I have an idea for how we can do that. Software is fundamentally about mapping data and the relationships between it. If we start from that perspective, given confirmation for both output requirements and mapping capability, I think we can formulate the UI requirements much more systematically.
Letâs first map out the whole structure before deciding how to implement individual pieces.
evaluation criteria
- understandable
- polite
- retaining attention