Pinboard bookmarks for March 2026

The new, improved alternative theory was best articulated by my colleague Guido Gendolla: people are averse to wasting effort, not to effort itself. Or as the lead author Nathalie André put it, effort is a cost, which people are sometimes willing to pay. Effort is more like money than like pain. Nobody likes wasting their money, but people are quite willing to spend money to pay for good things. Indeed, that’s the purpose of money. Spending money — or effort — can be fine. In contrast, pain is pretty much always bad.

Before the next roadmap cycle, answer five questions in writing. Who can commit a date? Who can reshape scope? Who can stop feature work for reliability? Who resolves dependency deadlocks? What happens when leadership overrides? If a team cannot answer those cleanly, it does not have a roadmap problem yet. It has an authority problem. Until that is fixed, every prioritization exercise is mostly cosmetic.

This was from 2012!