Embrace Constraints
What if the deadline is the best thing that ever happened to your project? A hard deadline, a small team, or a tiny screen makes you find the 20 percent that matters.
A client asked us to launch a video site alongside a big-budget TV show on a major network. The premiere date was printed on billboards, and we didn't have enough time to build it properly. So we did the only thing we could: we accepted the deadline and worked backward from it. That meant building on an off-the-shelf platform, which was objectively the wrong tool for the job. Nobody who visited the site ever knew.
Embrace constraints. A hard deadline, a small team, or a tiny screen cuts out whole categories of debate and makes you find the 20 percent that matters. When nobody hands you a constraint, set one yourself.
The proof is a project where we didn't have one. The front end was demoable early. The API team spent months debating which programming language to use, and the API never shipped. A new team, a familiar stack, and a hard deadline finally got it out the door.
We also get into:
- Architecture astronauts, and why Fredkin's paradox says the hardest choices matter least
- Why throwing away work is part of the work
- How small screens and App Store review make mobile apps better
- What Dr. Seuss, George Lucas, and Michelangelo made from their limits
- When to drop constraints and go blue sky, and why even that needs a boundary
