Tradeoffs with quality, scope, and deadlines

Every project involves tradeoffs with quality, scope, and deadlines.

Tradeoffs happen whether you decide or want them to. Strategy is deciding which tradeoffs to make. The default mode for most teams is a lack of strategy with tradeoffs happening to them.

So, we have these 3 interdependent variables of quality, scope, and deadlines.

Teams typically operate in 1 of 2 ways.

1. Fixed deadline, fixed scope, variable quality

With a fixed deadline and fixed scope, the only variable that can give is quality. It goes down.

This is the damage of upfront design and hard deadlines. You've committed to a fixed scope before the build has even kicked off.

As a result, only quality can suffer. Either the current project has immediately worse quality from rushing to make the deadline, or long-term quality suffers as tech debt piles up and the team is burnt out from too much crunch and overwork.

2. Fixed scope, fixed quality, variable deadline

With a fixed scope and fixed quality, the only variable that can give is the deadline. It goes long.

This means that while we have good intentions of only shipping high quality work, we have no predictability of when we'll ship it.

We move slowly, work takes several times longer than expected, the team gets demoralized, and the product becomes stale and irrelevant.

This is the default mode of waterfall companies and is typical of things like government contractors where strict standards and the scope of the work are locked in from the beginning.

But, there's a third way we can operate: Fixed deadline, fixed quality, variable scope.

3. Fixed deadline, fixed quality, variable scope

With a fixed deadline and variable, the only variable that can give is the scope. It gets smaller.

Instead of doing worse work or taking longer than we like, we simply do less, but better.

This smaller amount of work is the most essential and captures the majority of the value. It maintains our quality standards, which respects our customers and protects our reputation. We can always come back and add more to it, but usually, it fully address the problem.

Often, this more focused is even better than the full scope would have been. We've forced ourselves to make tradeoffs, hone in on what's valuable, and cut anything that isn't.

With this approach, we're able to move quickly, have a consistent shipping cadence, produce high quality work we're proud of, and stay motivated and energized.

We now have reliable deadlines that mean something. We've capped the potential downsides of building the wrong thing or making the wrong bet. We've retained all future optionality because we haven't created maintenance or scaling issues.

And, we're now able to have a clear mind to ask what's next and begin the process over again.