“Oh, I have an idea — and I’ve tried to sell it to my boss, and I failed. Too bad — now we are working on a product everybody hates, so much legacy, I’m going to start/join/rewrite a brand-new project, so next time people will listen to me”
— A thing that I’ve heard a lot from my friends
An Idea example: “Let’s use the new framework to improve the quality of the image recognition in our application”
I fear that they will not. There are many reasons why:
- You are selling an idea. Selling something is a skill. Great skill. And sometimes it’s a very unimportant skill when it comes to the science. It’s hard to sell something to the skilled sales person, and if they are asking you to sell something to them — this is an exercise, and it’s a part of a their training. I’ve seen it’s used in a field — just to prove a point.
- Your, boss, your manager, any stakeholder, they do not operate in terms of ideas only. They also care about risks. And it’s also a part of their training.
- Nobody expects the idea to be discussed on this meeting
- The idea is only good and complete in your head — just don’t forget about that
I tend to believe that ability to sell an Idea is not a requirement for an engineer. Such ideas are not a things to sell, at least most of them. Patents are.
- It’s a scientific method— this is what you might really need. Just let the numbers speak, and they will improve lots of things.
We have an issue with the OCR. It’s using to much of the CPU and RAM and the price of the product goes up. This new framework has a more permissive license, so we will be able to sell our application. This new framework has a great number of developers and is supported by [insert a big co name], this new framework can speed up our processes here (15%), here (13%) and here (3%), and the memory consumption goes down 10% here, here and here. And this is why:
There is a whole scientific method just for that. Just 4 steps. The observation. The hypothesis. The prediction and the Experiment. Why to avoid these scientific gems in computer science?
2. It’s a risk — and being honest about the risk is important not just for the managers — but also for you and your ideas. Let’s keep it simple — we all love castles in the sky, but most of us tend to live closer to the surface.
This new framework requires training, also the documentation is missing, and 3 persons support it on a GitHub. We might need to support these 3 heroes. Financially. By paying them for their great product.
3. It’s a kind of a private property when you just mention it — and If you think of the Idea as a property, it’s harder to make it everyone’s idea. Good ideas can evolve without their authors. So sometimes it makes sense to share your idea, to let others criticize it, even destroy it, steal it, ruin it, so it will have a chance to evolve. Sometimes a shower thought, being pronounced, could change things greatly. Sometimes a shower thought is something that is based on someone else’s researches, and, shower thoughts. So instead of cure-all, try cure-something and let people around you prepare for it.
— Hey Dave, what if we try this framework too?
4. What has been said vs what has been written. Just make it easier for all — write it down. The storage is cheap nowadays, and please don’t expect other people to get your Idea right away. People need the scope to understand it, and time to believe in it.
Just an idea. What if we can try this framework [link]
And last, but not the least.
5. It’s not a war, and Ideas are not the drones. There are usually no barricades, so there is not that much reasons to be sad because of ideas. Try next time. Sometimes It takes years.
Originally posted on Medium: https://medium.com/@nettsundere/on-selling-an-idea-to-change-something-in-a-project-you-are-working-on-8dd96872e8af