Island Hopping

Almost 25 years ago, I found myself sitting on a beach on the east coast of Ireland. I was with my good friend Rick who I studied together with at the University. We both had more or less quit our ‘first real’ jobs in Washington D.C. and decided to to take our savings and hit the road in Europe. Ireland was our first stop.

After consuming a decent portion of a bottle of Paddy’s Irish whisky we started to talk about jobs and the future. Rick studied English and Drama so he always had a flare for describing things well (in contrast to my Architect/Engineering view of the world).


The Discovery and Delivery Loop

At a recent meeting with director of Product Management we were reviewing the Product Roadmap discuss the status of things.  While reviewing one particular item he made a comment to the effect:

‘Wow, I remember when you guys started working on this feature. You seemed pretty much done after the first meeting. That was six months ago….'

I went onto to explain that he participated in one session (I was very happy he attended this meeting) to explore the problem and that we were very far from a good solution at that point.