I was talking to someone about bikeshedding earlier today and the general category of fully general participation, and it struck me that there are so…

I was talking to someone about bikeshedding earlier today and the general category of fully general participation, and it struck me that there are some fully general questions which are probably useful to have someone ask.

Some examples:

Do we have a clear success metric?

What would cause us to kill this project early?

Who is the DRI for this? (“directly responsible individual”)

Is this project the optimal use of the DRI’s time?

Does this project gain anything by being done now?

Who owns this going forward?

Can we do this faster?

Can we do this with less?

Do we have to do this? Really?

Where do we hit diminishing marginal returns?

What’s a version of this we’d be proud of?

How can we get a marketing / recruiting / PR / etc win out of this?

What do we hope to learn here?

And it wouldn’t be me if I didn’t add:

Have we considered charging more?