Getting 30 minutes with the big boss

Getting 30 minutes with the big boss

Thing is that getting 30 minutes of uninterrupted time from the boss is expensive and difficult. You add quite a bit more value if you can do the right thing from an off-the-cuff idea and a 2 minute demo session (with you changing the code live as the boss makes suggestions in the demo session) every week, even if it takes 30 weeks to get to a final result rather than 10 weeks with a 2 minute demo session at the 8 week mark.

This happens because the boss's time gets more expensive to schedule the more of it you want; a 2 minute demo session can be squeezed in between other meetings, where a 30 minute session needs the boss to commit to a full meeting, replacing some other work they'd be doing with that time.

And that's ignoring cases where the boss literally needs you to tell them what the computer is, and is not, good at. In my experience, there's plenty of people where it's not worth having the 30 minute up-front conversation with them, because they have no sense of what's reasonable to ask for, and expect that if it's easy to state the problem, it'll be easy to solve. With these people, keeping the time down focuses them on asking for relatively small things (since they don't have long to state the problem), and giving them an example of what can be done tends to focus their ideas on things like what they've just seen, rather than on all the things they could be asking for.

And yes, this is people management; in the end, it's about managing the person with the money such that they are happy to pay you to solve the problem, rather than choosing to pay someone else. It may well be easier on you to demand more from the person with money, but if that leads to them deciding that they're not paying you, but paying someone else, that's a problem for you, even if you can produce results quicker than the person they're paying.