I have a theory that product managers often inversely estimate the difficulty of feature requests. I call it the "It Shouldn't Be Too Hard" fallacy.
Many times I've had a PM cautiously explain a needed feature and almost apologize for how hard it will be, while I know it will actually be simple to implement. I'll later experience the exact opposite. A manager casually commits us to something that seems simple, but is, in fact, exceedingly difficult to accomplish.
I was working on research for my web apis series and was keeping some notes in a spreadsheet. I had an idea for something I wanted to do which I don't think exists. It occurred to me, this was a perfect example of me being in the PM's shoes, committing this fallacy.
I was using Google Sheets and had an idea that I wanted to split a cell in half while keeping both of these cells in the same column. Surely this functionality must exist. I mean, merging cells is a thing. Why can't I just do the opposite. "It Shouldn't Be Too Hard", right?
I gave it some thought and the idea of this feature started snowballing in complexity.
These are all questions that can have answers, but they're not obvious and will definitely upset some users.
A simpler solution occurred to me. I really only wanted this feature for formatting. I could accomplish the same thing using a tab.
posted 2022-12-08