What..? (WHY..?) How..?
“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”― Friedrich Nietzsche
In the current era, the software development industry is growing day by day. There is a huge amount of competition is going on between the IT industries. Alongside giant organizations, there are numerous startups are getting established every day. With all this competition, everyone is in the race and wants to really push hard to fulfill their customer needs. Everyone wants to deliver the best quality products, services and provide post-delivery maintenance. And when we consider all these factors, one factor no one can’t deny is “Timely (Rapid?..Quick?) Delivery” of products.
As there is a huge amount of competition in the IT industry, the service industry is not much behind. Every day someone comes up with the new idea and they want to develop and launch it as soon as possible before anyone else comes with similar (sometimes the same) ideas.
So because of all these reasons, many IT industries unintentionally (sometimes intentionally) have to follow DDD, don’t get confused it's just an abbreviation of “Deadline Driven Development”.
Now when we talk about the actual development of products, most of the time considering all the above aspects development team gets work with a strict timeline tagged with it. Then 2 questions come into mind are
- WHAT to develop?
- HOW to develop?
So in team meetings (not mentioning buzz words like “Sprint Planning” or “kick-off meetings” as each industry/project follow a different framework), business analysts let the team know WHAT to develop. Also if need of a project to deliver it quickly they might tell you the expected delivery date too.
Right after that, the development team starts looking into the task and they work on HOW to develop this task in the given time frame and we start to develop it.
So biggest component which we are missing in such scenarios is asking question or understanding WHY to develop it?
I feel every task should have 3 minimum questions
- WHAT to develop?
- WHY develop?
- HOW to develop?
We already know and discussed a lot about WHAT and HOW, but WHY plays an even more important role than the other 2. If we know the answer to WHY to develop then we can actually deal with the tasks in an even better way. It will help us understand the business point of view of each minute detail we develop. Many times questions come into mind that what is the need of one specific functionality or task but when we think from a product point of view we realize that it has a huge positive impact on the product.
e.g., In earlier days, e-Commerce applications used to ask users to either Sign Up or Sign In before entering inside and view the products. Later on, industry realized that not all users want to share their personal email ID or phone number with any random website or application until they really like the products and want to buy. So many e-Commerce industries came up with options like “Skip Sign In” and granted permission to users to view the products. Later if they want to buy or add it to the wish-list, they started asking for Sign Up or Sign In which is fine.
So being a developer if we get the task to add that “Skip Sign In” button on the login page, the question might come that what is need for this button as the application is already working fine as expected. But when we ask WHY business wants to add this button, then we can imagine what impact that simple button might have on the product. There is one inspiring story/case study of a similar example, you can go and read it “The $300 Million Button”
The question WHY to develop also helps to clear your thought process before starting on it and because of that most of the time we cover all corner cases needed for its seamless end-to-end execution. It also helps you to utilize your time effectively as there are fewer chances of rework.
Hence considering all this, I feel the one should never miss the WHY angle of anything/task you do. If you really liked this post please clap for it and do share it with your buddies. Cheers.
