This was one of those times when being the coach, and the client too, has paid off extremely well. When I have heard myself enumerating all those questions for which I did not have an answer yet, I felt immersed in a very deep state of desperation:
- In order to have a decent site, I need to be able to design one. I know a couple of things about modern trends, but not enough. More study is required – at least two or three courses about web design, web development, usability, and very important, how to choose a good color scheme (you may laugh; I know I did it when I heard myself).
- Then I need to be able to build a WordPress theme from scratch, so I need to learn that too.
- Then I need to find some good pictures for the home page and for the articles. That’s even more wicked. What looks relevant today, becomes out of tune and dull the next time when I look at them! What should I do?
I could have asked a professional web designer to build me one, but, as an Agile Coach, I have learned that bringing a technical expert does not help when the product vision is still unclear.
It was an interesting case. I am an Agile Coach. Helping people solving this kind of challenges is how I earn my living. Was I acting like an Agile practitioner? Definitely not, and that was something that needed to change immediately:
Coach: Dan, how would you change your approach if this project would be a professional, not a personal one? Let’s say it belongs to one of your teams that you are currently coaching. What would you do differently?
Client: Now that you mentioned it…
There was something in my speech that grabbed my attention: instead of placing my focus on the content – the bread and butter of a blog – I was focusing mainly on the outer shell. I was building a very customized face for some data which I didn’t have. Best case scenario, I was heading for a great deal of rework.
Romanians have a saying: “Să faci ce zice popa, nu ce face popa” – do what the priest says, not what he does. I remember coaching product owners and teams to go live as fast as possible, with just a Minimal Viable Product, but it’s not as easy as it looks, is it? You know that you can do it better, and having people interacting with a thing that looks only half baked, hurts your feelings. “Let’s wait another sprint. Let’s make the MVP just a little bit better” becomes the word of the day. Before you know it, “as fast as possible” becomes “already too late”. Not good.
So, I decided to use my own advice. I am going to archive the old site, install WordPress from scratch on my domain, and then I will start writing all the articles which are happily zooming in my mind, asking to go out.
The next articles in this category will be notes and scribbles from the trenches: challenges, solutions, lessons learned. Wish me luck. I am going in!