

The Obvious, the Easy, and the Possible - yuri41
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3047-the-obvious-the-easy-and-the-possible

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jphackworth
_“What needs to be obvious?” is a better question to ask than “What’s high
priority?”_

I don't think one is better than the other. They are both critical and serve a
different purpose.

"What needs to be obvious?" is a design question. It's important, but it
doesn't tell you what you should be doing each day.

"What's high priority?" is a project management question. Once your product
already exists, and you have a zillion features that should be possible but
don't need to be easy, you then have to prioritize all of them to figure out
what gets done.

~~~
asolove
I think this is exactly his point. Most web projects start out immediately in
project management crunch mode, listing long sets of features that are
"priorities" for various use cases or stakeholders. In project thinking, lots
of things can be priorities because you just do the first priority first and
then you can add developers or time to do the other "priorities."

What needs to be obvious? makes clear that priority, from a design standpoint,
is a fixed resource that time, money, and manpower can never buy more of. You
want to add this feature and make it obvious, yes you can afford to do so, but
no you cannot do it without making other things less obvious.

