The slogan shared by Bob Hoskins as part of adverts by BT during the 90’s cemented the values of conversation in the minds of a generation.
I have long been a champion of communication being the most important factor in any relationship.
Between two people whether romantically attached or just friends, quality communication is the foundation of a successful relationship. When my (now!) wife and I first met, she lived in Ireland and I was in England. This was the early days of broadband (certainly not high-speed!) and Skype and many arguments ensued when the call quality resulted in misunderstandings!
Having spent over 20 years working with customers onsite across UK & Europe the face to face conversations in the office, warehouse, factory floor, studio, theatre or shop have elicited so much information that helped tease out and understand the tacit details you would never get from just reading or writing documentation.
In a product world I believe very strongly that conversation, and from that a better appreciation of the big picture is on par with technology when it comes to building great products.
Whether in the early stages of research, talking to prospects or existing customers, verbalising a prototype to the development team or walking through the product in a demo, conversation fills in the gaps that are inevitable in a written user story and to be honest are not a bad thing.
I am not dismissing the value that Jira et al. play in developing products, but I have found at times too much emphasis is put on documentation over conversation and dare I say, common sense?
The times when we (the developers, testers and I) have solved the biggest problems for customers and produced the best products in the shortest periods of time, have been via sitting down together and just talking through what we wanted to build and how it would work.
Yes, there was documentation to support it (and in some industries I fully appreciate the level of documented evidence that is needed) and act as a point of reference but “just enough”. A conversation could often lead to a better outcome that the original documented requirement. That’s fine! The requirements/documentation can be updated, later if needed, but don’t let that stop the work from getting done.
By building up great relationships within the team helped to cement together the common understanding of how we would build it and how we wanted things to work.
A picture is worth a thousand words…. But a picture and a few hundred words tells so much morel!
