Engineering Lessons

1. Innovation isn’t linear. Often you need to make something worse before you can make it better.

2. When you replace an old system, you need to do it incrementally, otherwise it can be too much risk for stakeholders to support fully. You won’t actually see the benefits of replacing something until the end. When you’re adding new things, you’re also probably regressing. So manage expectations.

3. It’s good to let users try a new thing one piece at a time. Even if you want them to use it everywhere, You should let that be their idea.

4. When you’re trying to introduce a new workflow (eg different task tracking tool) to the team, it’s up to you to try and get people onboard with it and try it out (“i know you prefer keeping tasks in an xsl, let me synchronise that document for you for a while and we’ll see how it goes?”).

5. If your technical vision is sound, and you slowly work away at the problem with patience and perseverance, pragmatic compromises, and optimism, eventually the vision will win.