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About Finishing Our Projects in Corporate — Loose Ends Drain Us
One of the most stressful experiences I had in corporate was knowing a product was going to market unfinished. Yes, there was a deadline, mandated months or a year before by the powers that be, but it had been an unrealistic deadline to start with. Why did every single product have to go out to the customers with loose ends dangling from it, sometimes literally?
I worked mainly in software, but also in telecommunications and physical setups of networks. My job was to write about them, explain them, demonstrate their usefulness, and give steps on how to make them work. I wasn’t the designer, but I had to track every stage of development.
I learned that if I saw something wasn’t working, which I often did because I was an alpha station, no one wanted to know.
Transparency to the customer was not the goal. Getting the new product in front of them was. Selling that product was. It was not seen so much as a service to the customer, but more, primarily, as a means of profit for the company.
If anything was problematic in the design, the bugs would be fixed in the next upgrade or the one after that — or the one after that. It depended on whether customers noticed the flaws or not. Frequently they didn’t because they didn’t apply certain aspects of the product in their…
