When I work with teams, Lean is usually the suggested default methodology I start with. While I’m not dogmatic about every part of the methodology, its principles are widely applicable. Lean is rooted in working small, iterating through trial and error, and collecting evidence to guide decision-making.
Given that Lean has been dubbed the “scientific method applied to software development”, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to make a direct comparison when I saw Yann LeCun’s and Elon Musk’s tweet (X) thread cage match.
🧐The result was surprisingly satisfying.
To qualify as delivering value a feature must be validated and reproducible.
To be validated and reproducible, it must be described in sufficient details in a user story.
To be released the acceptance criteria must be validated by the PM and reviewers. To be reproduced, the feature must be widely available to the users and sufficiently interesting.If you do research and don't release, it's not value.
Without validation and reproducibility, chances are your methodology was flawed and you fooled yourself into thinking you did something great.
No one will ever hear about your work.
No one will pick it up and build on top of it. No one will build new technology and products with it.
Your work will have been in vain.
You'll die bitter and forgotten.
If you never released user value but somehow developed it into a product, you might die rich.
But you'll still be a bit bitter and largely forgotten