Company offers a graphics drawing program free for clients to use. It handles simple and slightly complex x/y data, multiple lines, the usual stuff, according to fish.
But the main users of the program are mostly business types, and the marketing chief tells the software developers, including this pilot fish, that they would love the drawing program to have a new kind of chart for fiscal data.
It should support things like five-day business weeks, quarters that could start anywhere in the year and be broken up by four- or five-week months — in short, a lot of things that the charts in the existing drawing program don’t handle correctly.
Fish and his team spend a few days analyzing the code changes that will be needed, then report back to marketing that it will take only about two months of work by the team to add this new functionality.
Unacceptable, says the marketing chief. “It couldn’t possibly take you more than a few days to do.”
Fish and colleagues: How could it be done so much faster?
Marketing chief: “Look, you just put some dots on the page and draw a line through them. How long could it take?”
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