Heuristic method of everything!

Calculating consequences of decisions requires plenty of time and cognitive power! With limited resource best method is heuristic! According to Billy Vaughn Koen “A heuristic is anything that provides a plausible aid or direction in the solution of a problem but is in the final analysis unjustified, incapable of justification, and potentially fallible.”

A grandmaster can’t calculate and predict the next moves of opponents he uses heuristics like:

Castle on the king’s side as soon as possible.
Keep bishops on open diagonals.

George Polya father of problem solving wrote a book about heuristics in mathematics. One of them is: If you cannot solve the proposed problem, try to solve first some related problem. Project managers heuristically allocate sufficient resources to the weak link. Heuristics in creative thinking could be asking what if questions and challenging assumptions.

My favorite heuristic in software development is: Find a simple and easy to change or replace solution instead of finding a perfect one. When I was developing whiteboard.team there were many decisions that I couldn’t find optimal solutions with my current resources and constraints. It is supposed to be a minimum viable product. So I used my experience to collect and develop heuristics to solve problems fast and frugal and the result was very reliable. But I have no idea what heuristics are in growth and marketing.

What are your heuristics? Any heuristic you wanna share?