I used to think this. Then I noticed how often "preparation" became its own infinite loop.

At work we built something from a 2-page spec in 4 months. The competing team spent 8 months on architecture docs before writing code. We shipped. They pivoted three times and eventually disbanded.

Planning has diminishing returns. The first 20% of planning catches 80% of the problems. Everything after that is usually anxiety dressed up as rigor.

The article's right about one thing: doing it badly still counts. Most of what I know came from shipping something embarrassing, then fixing it.

▲

jstanley 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think you may have slightly misunderstood the article.

"Preparation" isn't mentioned explicitly, but by my reading it would come firmly under "is not doing the thing".

	▲	olliepro an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Getting everyone to fall in love with the thing is not doing the thing... learned this as a data scientist brought in to work on a project which ended soon thereafter. A team of 20 people spent 1.5 years getting people to love an idea which never materialized. Time was wasted because the technical limitations and issues came too late... it died as a 40 page postmortem that will never see daylight.

▲

dakiol 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Is it always like that? I worked in teams where we had some planning beforehand (months, like in your example). We shipped just fine and the product started to bring money. I guess it depends, as usual.

▲

sghiassy an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

That’s not a zero-sum game.

Pivoting to zero-planning, would also have a basket of flaws.