Those of you calendar-savvy readers following along at home have probably noticed that I’ve missed my deadline.

Sunday July 9th was the 30-day mark, and to date, I’ve only posted fifteen of my promised thirty ideas.

Now what?

Well, as project manager of this 30-days-30-ideas project, it’s my responsibility to keep the project rolling so that the marketing department (me) can select a product to develop, so that the product manager (also me) can draw up a set of requirements, and so that the technical staff (me again) can actually implement the product. Unfortunately, delays at this stage of the project are holding up the entire operation.

First of all, what happened? Well, as is commonly the case in software companies, I made a poor estimate. During my intended development time-line, I forgot to take into account the wedding of one of my brothers. And I forgot that I had promised to design a website for a friend. And I forgot about a nine-day vacation I had already planned.

Oops.

So, as is also commonly the case in software companies, I missed the ship date because I hadn’t finished implementing the feature requirements (the 30 ideas) slated for this release. In such a situation, I can either choose to release right now, with the features that have been completed (the 15 ideas currently on the table) or I can delay the release so that the promised features can be implemented.

To make that decision, I should probably take a step backward and think about the original goals of the project. By publicly posting 30 ideas within 30 days, I had a few of these objectives in mind:

• To aide in the decision-making process. Many of these ideas have been knocking around in my head for a long time, and by writing a detailed evaluation of each idea, I’ve been forced to put each of them under the magnifying glass, identifying their strengths and weaknesses, from both a marketing perspective and a technical perspective.
• To solicit feedback. I knew I’d be giving a few of my ideas to the world, and that I might end up sparking competition, but I figured it was worth it. The feedback I’d receive from the software community would more than pay for itself. And I was right. The feedback I’ve gotten, from people posting to the blog and from people emailing me directly, has been spectacular. My decision making process has certainly been influenced by the contributions of my readers.
• To generate interest in my project. In the days following my interview at Google, my blog got a lot of traffic, and I devised the 30-ideas project as a way to hold the attention of that audience while I worked on some ideas for a software business. Hopefully, some of the people who have been reading this blog over the last month have found it interesting enough to continue reading along as I develop my product and build my business.

At this point, even though I’ve only fulfilled half of my idea quota, I think I can say that I’ve accomplished those goals.

Of course, there are a few potential disadvantages if I declare the 30-ideas project finished at this point:

• Bad press. When I announced this project, I said that I’d publish 30 ideas. Publishing only 15 is like releasing a product with half of the promised features. Over-promise and under-deliver. Not the best way to impress potential customers.
• I might miss out on a great idea. A few of the ideas I’ve posted have turned out much stronger than I anticipated. By starting out with a silly, fluffy idea, and then spending a few hours contemplating the idea and writing up my analysis, I discovered that some of those ideas weren’t as silly and fluffy as I had originally thought. By forcing myself to publish all 30 ideas, I’ll stretch my creativity to its limits, and that’s always a great exercise.

Given those considerations, it’s a difficult decision. But I think it makes the most sense for me to compromise, on both the idea count and the release date, so that this project can move forward.

So I’ve decided to extend my deadline by just a few days. By the end of this week (Saturday, July 15), I’m going to officially end the window of opportunity for posting ideas. I have another five or six ideas that I’ve already been sketching out in my mind over the last month but that I haven’t written about yet. So those are like partially-implemented features. I’m not too uncomfortable letting the deadline slip by a few days to finish implementing a handful of features that are already in the works.

In all likelihood, when this project wraps up, I’ll have somewhere with between 19 and 22 ideas, published over the course of 36 days.

It’s not as neat and tidy as 30-ideas-in-30-days.

But, then again, nothing ever quite is.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 11th, 2006 at 11:56 pm and is filed under biz. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.