Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Please tell me what we are doing. Please don’t read from a catalog.

Person beaming with confidence: Look. Here is a block diagram of our system. You see we are using Snowflake, Spark, Databricks, Kafka, Tableau, ThoughtSpot, and toss in a little Excel for good measure.

Person baffled but interested: Interesting. I would like to know what we are doing or what functions we are performing. Do you have something showing that?

Person beaming with confidence: silence

I’ve been in this conversation too many times and walked away with too many headaches and too much heartburn. I want to know what we are doing, i.e., the function. I really don’t want to see the names and cute little logos of products.

Consider, as one example, Excel from Microsoft. It is a fine product. It is such a fine product that it can function in many ways. Excel can be a database of people with name, phone number, email address, home address, and so on. Excel can be the repository in a data call where there are 50 questions and places for 50 different organizations to place their 50 answers all in one thing. Excel can be a project organizer where each sheet contains information on each phase of the project and each participant. And, guess what, Excel can function for the finance folks to keep track of money (wow, I think it was created to do that last one).

The same can be said for each of the products that Person beaming with confidence said at the beginning.

Please, tell me what we are doing. Then tell me what product we are using for each function we perform. Please try harder to communicate how we engineered a system to do something useful for people.

We can do better. Let’s do better.