Jay Paroline

As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, we are working hard on a 2.0 version of the product. One of the questions our team is asked quite frequently is “when will it be ready?” This question is impossible for us to answer, because ready is not defined. It’s one of the dangers of working without a real spec.

There are a lot reasons why we don’t use a real spec, none of which are up to me so I’ll not discuss them here.

Whenever 2.0 gets close to what everyone thinks we have agreed on, people look and poke at it, decide they don’t like things or realize nobody ever asked for critical feature x, or it somehow didn’t make it onto our bug list, and then we have to go back and get new designs, file a bunch of bugs, and set a new milestone. Repeat, repeat, repeat. It’s not just for 2.0 that it works this way, it’s whenever you’re working without a complete spec. When the goal posts for done are constantly moving, the question of “when will it be done?” Is really a question of “when will the goal posts stop moving?”

To break the cycle, we’re picking a done date, and mandating that the goal posts stop moving some time before that date. Working towards that, we’ve submitted our “last chance” milestone, meaning after this milestone any decisions/changes/designs must be final, because we’re going to call it done when those have been implemented, or when we hit our chosen date, whichever comes first.