Slide decks
The assignment is simple, generate a slide deck to tell story foo. Foo's story should have components x, y, and z. Three weeks go by and the slide deck is still incomplete. Why?
Honestly, I am not sure. The team working on the project grew (my choice) and as a result, so did the number of chefs in the kitchen. The more people present, the more diverse viewpoints (this is a good thing) but when the level of understanding of the goal is not uniform, you have issues.
- Too much detail. A person is too deep in the weeds and so misses the overall goal of the deck.
- Perfectionism. The deck needs to be good enough to sell the story but doesn't require perfectionism.
- Scope creep. This is a hard one personally to manage as I do want everything in the deck but realistically to make something ship you have to keep scope tight, small, and on topic.
The combination of the three above have led to recreating the same slides probably a dozen times over, so much that I am burned out from working on the project. Slide decks matter, but they aren't engineering work. They don't ship, they don't change the bar, they sell [something] or they report status, and I think of them accordingly as such.