Built it, but nobody came: Avoiding over-engineering

Designing and building something that people need is completely different from implementing what they asked for. Engineers don't like to say no; helping is empowering and pride makes it difficult to back down. Product owners don't always have the context to understand how hard it is to implement a feature and a throwaway request can add weeks to a project. We're all limited by our perspective, so the trick is to recognize what should be built practically. The goal shouldn’t be to say no, it should be to empower. Learn from our successes and mistakes!

We'll discuss ways to focus feature development, manage expectations, delivering value without compromising effectiveness, and real-world examples of technically successful but over-engineered projects.

Jon is a Senior Engineer at Four Kitchens and a lynda.com author with 13 courses on development. He’s spoken at Drupal Con Los Angeles, many Drupal Camps about performance, site auditing and deployments. He’s also the author of multiple Drupal utilities, including site_audit, generate_errors, feeds_import_io, and a co-author of the first version of Terminus. He's also got a beard.