Strategy

Estimates Lead to Poor Expectations

Over the past 10+ years we’ve learned that estimating is a really hard and deceptive practice. In most cases it leads to bad expectations and unkept promises. Additionally, many companies and startups think they know what will make their project successful, so they look to hand off a list of features to build.

1 min
July 16, 2015
Andrew Verboncouer
Partner & CEO

Over the past 10+ years we’ve learned that estimating is a really hard and deceptive practice. In most cases it leads to bad expectations and unkept promises. Additionally, many companies and startups think they know what will make their project successful, so they look to hand off a list of features to build.

The problem with strict feature sets is that most ideas are assumptions that should be tested and validated through customer development, user interviews, prototyping and iterative releases. Even in the case of scratching your own itch, validation that other people are having the same problems and are willing to pay for your product or service to solve them is the first and most important step to a successful project.

We love to create the right solutions with the right partners, but we’ve found that it’s just about impossible to estimate the time to complete a project of any size accurately and effectively.

We value collaboration and conversations that get us to the root of the problem, allowing us to fully understand, prescribe, and execute a valuable solution.

Planning is still essential

Although estimates help gauge what you’re going to spend, we’d rather focus on helping you prioritize R&D and execute on what’s going to bring you the most value.

To guide the project, we develop an initial plan (including rough estimated costs and time) that evolves based on the new data and information we gather along the way.

Weekly sprints & retrospectives

We work in weekly sprints that allow us to focus and prioritize features that we’ll use to test assumptions in the oncoming weeks or features that have already been validated through some other means. At the end of each sprint we have a conversation with the whole team involved and review our progress as well as complete a retrospective that analyzes things that went well, things that went poorly, and what we can improve upon in the future. This process helps us to work even more effectively with our customers.

Our goal & promise to you

It’s our goal to partner with companies that desire real solutions to problems and don’t simply want a team to execute a list of features and functionalities that may or may not be valuable. The goal of creating effective solutions through validation helps us guide the scope, process, and planning towards an outcome that’s based on results. We iterate until it works and then keep iterating to improve your product across the board.

Make investments not expenses

We want your investment to be one that yields well and not a cost that’s simply marked as another expense. When we use validation and user feedback to drive the project’s scope, process, and planning, we’re on the right track to building an effective and useful solution.

Interested in working with us? Start the conversation using our partnership form below and we’ll be in touch!

Actionable UX audit kit

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