Jury-riggers and goldplaters
In maritime transport and sailing, jury-rigging involves making temporary makeshift running repairs with only the tools and materials on board.
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Gold-plating is a method of depositing a thin layer of gold onto the surface of another metal, most often copper or silver.
The best teams have a diverse set of skills and attitudes. Igor, Billy, Klaus and Tina are a group of product builders that build cool and useful things together at Acme Inc.
Igor and Tina are jury-riggers. They like to be resource-efficient and to build solutions that make the most impact with the least amount of work. Their favorite phrase is YAGNI (you aren't going to need it).
Billy and Klaus are goldplaters. They like to think about the future, and favor solutions that cover edge cases, potential scenarios, and what we might need 6 months from now. Their favorite phrase is "what if?".
Initially, Igor and Tina were on one team, and Billy and Klaus were on another. At first, everything was great! Igor and Tina blazed through their projects, delivering the work twice as fast as what was estimated. Billy and Klaus meanwhile, were in their element: mapping out the system, scoping carefully, and pressure-testing every assumption before writing a line of code. They relished the planning - and were laying the groundwork that would make the next five features easier in addition to what they needed to deliver in the coming weeks. Their designs anticipated the edge cases, and their abstractions promised to leave the codebase cleaner and more extensible than they found it.
But over time, the pairings started to show their cracks. Igor and Tina moved fast - sometimes too fast. In their rush to ship, they cut corners that turned out to matter: an edge case that wasn't so edge after all, a "should have" requirement that turned out to be more like a "must have" in hindsight, and so on. Billy and Klaus had the opposite problem. With no one to push back on "what if?", every scenario felt worth planning for, and they spent as long scoping the work as they did building it, polishing foundations for a building that hadn't gone up yet.
What was management at Acme Inc. to do? After some deliberation, they decided that Tina should switch with Klaus. Now, Igor the jury-rigger was working with Billy the goldplater, and Klaus the goldplater was working with Tina the juryrigger! It was a bold move - and some in the leadership team were concerned that the very different personalities would clash, causing friction and reducing velocity even further.
And indeed, there was a period of forming, storming and norming before there was much performing, but the performing did come and it came better than expected.
With the jury-riggers and goldplaters keeping each other in check, the goldplaters did not go overboard with their implementations. The jury-riggers still worked at pace, but were reined in whenever their solutions introduced too much risk, or carried too many trade-offs.
In the end, Acme Inc. IPO'ed to great acclaim with 10x returns. Igor, Klaus, Billy and Tina lived happily ever after.
I started writing this post thinking a cast of stick-figure characters would make the explanation more entertaining. Now I'm not so sure, by the end I was tripping over my own names, and you may have been too. But the working styles behind them are real: Igor, Tina, Billy and Klaus are all people I've worked with, and, more often than I'd like to admit, they're me.
I'm a jury-rigger at heart. Part of my own growth has been learning to strike a better balance with my gold-plating colleagues - to sit with "what if?" a little longer before reaching for the duct tape. I still think there's a sweet spot to find, and I'll keep searching for it in myself. But in the meantime, a diverse team with high trust and good communication gets you most of the way there on its own.
