Waterfall 2.0 & the Big-headed movement towards innovation

Today is the biggest moment in history where there is such a big push to "change" the whole world, advance existing systems and ways of working, and disrupt existing technologies! I find major issues with this movement, and that it often has the opposite results of what it claims to do.

THE NEW BIG-HEADED TREND OF PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

I have observed 2 main approaches that companies use to develop new technologies and products:

1. Find an existing need, and then how to cover it, using whatever technology or system suits best, as long as the final system suits the needs of the final customers and users better. This approach is:

• Consistent with solving existing problems, and improving human life
• Consistent with practical, scientific and customer-focused thinking
• Mostly used in Europe

2. Build something very new, newer than anything existing. And then users will find how to use it. This approach:

• Mostly creates new ways to do the same things, but also new needs that didn't exist before
• Does not not necessarily solve existing problems. It is a "hack" to skip existing problems.
• Is mostly used in the US

Also, the latter approach is mostly used for financial reasons than for covering user needs. The big plan here is doing by a certain kind of investors. They want to make something extremely new, make everyone else use it, and then have the exclusive for it.

Waterfall 2.0: The big-headed version of Waterfall

Interestingly, this latter approach is more like a hack to the "Waterfall model" of product development.

In Waterfall software development, products are designed following a step-by-step approach, where when each step finishes you move on to the next: get the team together, build the product, fill the warehouses, and when it's ready, send the marketers to promote it to other people.

A simple view of the Waterfall Product Development Methodology

Such a methodology also applies in Business, for physical product development.

Previously, the Waterfall-like business model would often lead to companies losing a lot of money when either their competitors would have already developed something new by the time their product was out, or when the customers wouldn't want to buy it.

Such issues with the Waterfall-like business development model are described in books like “From Zero to One” by Peter Thiel, and “The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries, two of the most influential books about entrepreneurship and startups.

How “Waterfall 2.0” is trying to improve Waterfall’s risks and inefficiencies

How have newer companies resolved the above? Some used Agile methodologies. But a few seem to have resolved the issues of Waterfall in another way, using what I call ”Waterfall 2.0”, or “a big-headed version of Waterfall”:

1. Companies are developing "cutting edge technology". Their hope is that, the product will sell when it is ready, because it will have very new technology.
2. If customers buy the product, the companies will have the exclusive to that technology. Because of this, they don't care as much if they fail a few times. They only need to succeed once to make even bigger profits than they would if they had succeeded all previous times.
3. Marketers are promoting the "greatness" and "newness" of this technology. They use grandiose boasting methods to make people believe it will be better when it is ready, because it is "advanced".

This approach is driven by a big financial game, that is not aimed at improving customer's lives, but to maximize profits, done so continuously against customer’s needs. Its main goal is to force customers constantly use new things so that someone else is making profits from it.

Drawing “inspiration” from futuristic sci-fi films

Part of the above trend to make new technology is driven by dreams about the future coming from sci-fi films. When AI-technologists don’t consider user needs any more, they try to “guess the future” to find new ideas about what to build. But technologists often lack imagination and creativity. most of their “futuristic dreams” inevitably come from sci-fi films, like “Star Wars”, “Star Trek”, “The Terminator” and “X-Men”! Such films are figments of imagination of screenwriters at the time of their inspiration. They are not “designs for prototypes” for future products, even though some technology and AI designers use them as such.

Do you really want to make products because they appeared in a sci-fi film that may have nothing to do with customer and the world's needs? There is a better future to build the future! Instead, I find that new technology requires even more user and market research, and such companies would do better to improve more on those areas, and discuss more with customers.

The marketing faults of Waterfall 2.0, and ultimately, of Waterfall 2.0 itself:

“Let’s advance technology & science so it is ‘newer’”

The root argument of such marketers is: Let's advance technology & science so it is "newer", because it is old. That's a faulty generalization. Newer is not always better. Here are a few reasons:

1. Breakthroughs brings about complexity, and require everything else in the system to change to accommodate them.
2. The issues that were causing inefficiencies with previous technologies will not be solved, when no one is trying to solve them in specific, whatever technology they use.

For example, if people weren't collaborating more, it doesn't mean they will collaborate more just because they have more fancy tools for that purpose.

Generally speaking, this suggestion is a variation of Murphy's law. Murphy's law is a popular adage that states that:

"things will go wrong in any given situation, if you give them a chance," or more commonly, "whatever can go wrong, will go wrong."

The variation in this case is "if these technologies can provide all these new features, everyone will use them". That doesn't follow! No, they won't use all the features just because they are there. They will use them if they want to, in the way that they suit them.

On the contrary, they may collaborate less, because:

1. No one promoted collaboration itself. That is done with human soft skills, and not more technological tools.
2. The products themselves bring a new world of complexity in their use: Thy include technical ones that have to do with the product itself, as well as the need to hire new staff and technology experts, train them, and update all the existing infrastructure.

These jocular videos by the comedy news-source “The Onion” satirize how new technologists think everyone is thinking about technology today. However,. customers and users don't think like that.

“Use the latest technologies or you will be left behind”

Most marketers of this approach did not do market and use research on the people they want to sell products to.They push advertisements of whatever their companies make to social media, and make them look "shiny", "glittery" and "powerful", and hope that this way they will "impress" the customers, and so they will want to buy their new products and services.

The biggest way in which they use to make people buy them is: "Get the latest technologies, or you will be left behind". I call this 'fear-mongering marketing', and it based on confused premise. No, they won't be left behind. A key question here is: When will they be left behind? In 100, 1,000 or 1,000,000 years? The "future" refers to an unspecified length of time away from the present.

Some better questions I would suggest are: Which aspects of a business need to be changed and which not? And for those that need to be changed, what is a good solution to improve them?

“We are advancing science”

Changing the scientific tools doesn’t always make science better, unless it is aiming to improve the areas which actually were causes of the issue. Adding more technology to science is also making it much more complex. Scientists will have to know more new things, and it is arguable whether they need these to make new scientific findings. They will have to be spending more time on learning technology, than doing science.

Are these the products that we want and need today?

I find that the best outcome of this movement is that companies and developers have started to realize that the future is something that we can build. And that changing things is more easy than it seemed in the past. We need to move forward and not any more be impressed by "change", "innovation", "advancement" and "disruption".

We need to consider when we need to innovate and when not. When will innovation will bring good benefits, and when it will complicate things, bring about unnecessary costs and confusions, and ultimately neither benefit customers, nor advance science, and not make the world a "better" place?

To do that, I always focus on practicality. Practicality, and not sentiment, should always be the biggest driver for decision-making.

Simon Chatzigiannis 03/11/2019