Tradeoffs I made in February
A short audit of three explicit tradeoffs and what they cost.
February was the first month I wrote my tradeoffs down explicitly, the same week I made them, instead of reconstructing them from memory three months later. The discipline did not improve the decisions, but it improved the conversations I had with myself about them.
The three#
I traded a faster ship date on a feature for a cleaner internal data model. The feature was a week late. The model has saved me about three weeks since. Worth it.
I traded a one-day fix to a recurring user complaint for a five-day fix that addressed the underlying issue. The first day of the five-day fix was harder than the one-day fix would have been. The fifth day made the complaint disappear in a class of users I had not predicted. Worth it, but only because I had also written down what I expected the upside to be. The actual upside was different and that turned out to be the interesting part.
I traded a calmer week, mid-month, for shipping a difficult conversation with an early user. The conversation went well. The week was not calm. The relationship is better. The calm I could have had was not real calm; it was avoidance dressed up as patience. Worth it.
What the practice gave me#
Not better decisions. The decisions themselves were about the same as ever. What changed was the speed at which I could see, six weeks later, whether I had been right. The written record made the answer findable, and findability is most of what learning from a tradeoff actually means.