
Decisions, Decisions or Why Baskets of Options Dominate - KentBeck
https://medium.com/@kentbeck_7670/decisions-decisions-or-why-baskets-of-options-dominate-9ac63658b593
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george_ciobanu
There is an underlying assumption that a basket of features = sum(individual
features). That is true sometimes, but other times a bunch of features
launched together have a compound aggregate value - they're much more valuable
launched together than individually.

But for cases where that's not true this is an excellent insight.

The part I didn't understand was the P50. Why do you get a demerit if you do
100% of everything, and how is discovering and solving an objective discovered
along the way encouraged? I would love if the author or someone else explained
it to me. Overall a great article.

Bit of advice: I'd mention early in the article and/or the title that this
will apply to product thinking. I was curious about the financial part and
pleasantly discovered that it uses this learning in product development -
though way far down the page, I almost didn't finish reading it.

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andreareina
"P50 goals address sandbagging."

Hitting 100% when the expectation is ~50% means implies a really bad estimate,
or that the estimates were a lie, probably in an attempt to look good.

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archgoon
Which on the face of it almost seems reasonable; but it seems that this would
just introduce another form of sandbagging.

"What are your goals for this quarter?"

"Make the color of the button to be green instead of red and World Peace"

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gangstead
Author makes a good point, but wouldn't the cost of decisions map to the
options analogy as the cost of the option, which has to be paid no matter if
you exercise or not?

I'm no financial wonk but in his example if the $1 stock has a $.1 option and
holding the stock has an up/flat/down outcome of +$1/0/-$1 the option scenario
goes from +$1/0/0 to +$.9/-$.1/-$.1. If the outcomes are evenly distributed
expected value for holding is 0 and for the option goes from $.33 to $.23.
It's still positive if the option is cheap enough. Back to the project
planning metaphor maybe a road map has a single option cost but weekly cycles
are a series of options that eat away at your expected outcome.

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vxxzy
Sounds like the "premium paid" on a basket of options is realized in more
decisions. Quote: "The shift to options on baskets is consistent with people
trying to minimize the number of decisions they make."

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moosey
Instead of saying that a basket of options is a minimization of decisions, I
would say that it's admitting that most decisions are answered with a series
of statistical odds. If you can play a game where you think that the system
has missed the boat on some small chunk of statistical possibility, for
instance, if you think that the market is missing the potential for wealth in
genetic analysis with artificial intelligence, then you push some moderate
percentage of additional wealth or leverage in that direction.

This is the actual state of the world. Most real world decisions aren't
actually yes/no. It's probability analysis, which is a far more difficult yet
more accurate model of decision making.

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t-h-e-chief
It is a very interesting topic and a good article. I did prefer Don
Reinertsen's discussion of it though (I was lucky enough to see and meet him
at a Yow! conference in Melbourne)

There is a video of the talk here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyZNxB172VI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyZNxB172VI)

