Over-Explain to Align Expectations

What's up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of the p w podcast. I'm your host as always, Peter Witham. You can find me and this podcast at peterwitham.com. Have you ever had that scenario where you feel like you've described something to somebody?

And I'll use an example here. Right? You've described to a software developer what feature you want and how you want that feature to work. And then they go away and do it, and they come back and you look at it and, you know, like, this is not what I wanted, or this is not how I saw it, or this doesn't work how I expected, or it's just bad software architecture. The reason I'm talking about this is it's very easy to forget when you are the one that's coming up with something that you've got all the details in your head.

Right? And you've got all the experience of whatever it may be and the idea for the feature or the design, and you forget to communicate the little details because you think to yourself, this probably seems obvious, and I don't need to explain it, especially when it comes to software. Because if you're talking with other developers, you know that they've got a development background, and therefore, you think they're probably thinking about these things the same way I do, and they'll probably architect it the way that I would. Or maybe you don't think about that at all because you just think this feature is normally done this way, and that must be the way everybody does it. And that's always problematic.

Right? Sometimes it's the case. Sometimes it's not. And I think that the best advice I can give you for those scenarios is overexplain. I think that you have to because if you don't specify the details, it's very hard to come back afterwards and say, that's not what I wanted, or that's not how you should do this.

Right? Because, again, you've not communicated the rules, the restrictions, or whatever you wanna call them, but let's just call them rules for simplicity. So if I specify that I want a feature in an app to run every twenty four hours, every seven days, once a month, whatever that may be, I've been if I don't explain how I see that working, someone's gonna go and code that thinking this thing, whatever it is, needs to happen once a month or whatever it may be. Or the client has said, they really like the color red, so let's make the majority of everything red. But maybe that's not what you meant.

Right? You just wanted red to be the prominent color and the others to be complementary or something like that. And that's what I'm talking about. It's very easy to overlook the details, and then you get something back, and you've that's not great, or it's not quite what I want. And it's really everybody's fault, but I guess primarily, it's your fault because you did not specify the details even though you feel like maybe you shouldn't have to.

So for example, if I was to say, hey. Go fill up the car with gas, petrol, whatever, fuel. Okay. We all know you're gonna drive to a station. You're gonna open some kind of cap.

You're gonna fill it with gas, fuel, petrol, whatever. Close the gap, and you're done. But I didn't specify which quality of fuel it should be. So how do I know that the person's gonna use premium because that's what I use? Because I didn't tell them that.

And maybe they don't, or maybe they do. But, hey, it's random at that point. Right? It's a bad example, but you get the idea. If you're finding more often than not, you're not quite getting what you're hoping for, make sure you specify all the details you can think of even if they seem obvious to you or things that you should not have to specify.

And then I think you're gonna get a better result. Now that's gonna add to your frustration, of course, because I shouldn't have to specify this, but it's on you if you don't. And also, if it's wrong, you can then say, look. I said this. I want this documented.

You've got something to reference back to say that you specified this particular point. I think it's gonna work out for you. But like I say, the more time you spend in your particular industry, easier it is to forget that not everybody sees it the way you do. Not everybody has the experience of doing things the right way, the wrong way, the best way based on, again, your experiences over time. Or maybe they've got a better way, and you get to talk about it.

But try diving into the details.