Shipped without docs or i18n

Description

  • Skipping translations or how to use something in the name of speed is a great way to reduce speed to 0

Disproof

  • As many customers as you care to serve can use the product and read the labels

Consequences

  • Lose time you never really had catching up
  • Destroy trust
  • In the case of documentation, if the product is not very useable you also probably vastly underestimated your suport costs

Causes

  • Someone forgot that multiple work streams could happen at once
  • Or, because things like documentation or UX labels are dependent on the product itself, time for working on these things is somewhere between:
    • A) Right when you start off, earning you the pain of fixing and updating documents and labels as you go along and iterate; or
    • B) Once you’re in production and dealing with pain and representational damage for these things not being in place
  • Often, teams use the excuse of (A) to wait until (B), which again just results in all the hard work of doing everything else on time and in sync being wasted as you pay the scramble price or pay the user happiness price

Approaches

  • Learn to coordinate, ideally through automation