Tags: #learning-how-to-work About five months into my first job, I expressed to my boss how I struggle with showing unfinished work and asking for feedback. He helped me dig into why and we concluded that it's a bit of a vulnerability thing. I always come out of feedback meetings feeling energized, but I always dread the moments leading up to them. I dread the prospect of being criticized. That's a personal thing for me to work on, but what my boss told me has stuck with me. He said, "Avoid failing late." Avoid failing late. Failing late is expensive. This applies to many disciplines, but I'm a designer so I'll use software as an example. In the initial stages of a project, where you're investigating a problem, defining scope, if you make a mistake here, it is not expensive to fix. You haven't built anything yet. You can do more research, you can address scope. You can still ensure you're solving the correct problem. In the next stage, maybe we're brainstorming, dreaming up ideas, sketching out ideas on paper, throwing together some low fidelity designs. Making a mistake here is also not expensive. Paper is cheap, you haven't boxed yourself in to a high fidelity solution. You can still ensure that you are coming up with a good solution. In the next stage, maybe we've decided on a solution, the architecture has solidified, and we're moving on to refine the visual design. At this point, if you have made a mistake in the previous stages, it has become more expensive to fix. If you are already polishing a design, and now you discover that it solves the wrong problem or is a poor solution, it's challenging to go back and realign stakeholders or redo the screens from scratch. But, at this point it's still a design. It's not in code yet. Depending on the project, the leadership, this can still be fixed. In the next stage, we're working with the engineers to ship. The design is now being built out in code. If an error is discovered here, it is a more expensive fix than the previous stage. What you want to avoid at all costs, is allowing a mistake to get to the users. ---- Created: February 24, 2021 Last Modified: February 28, 2021