Alright, let’s talk about this thing we used to call “Brent Peterson Votes”. Don’t ask me why it had that name, maybe Brent Peterson himself came up with it, maybe it was just a weird inside joke that stuck. Anyway, we started using it a while back when we needed a way to figure out what stuff to work on next, you know, like features or sometimes even technical decisions.
Setting it Up
The idea sounded straightforward enough on paper. First, we’d gather up all the ideas. Anyone could throw something into the mix. We just listed them out, usually on a shared doc or sometimes scribbled on a whiteboard.
Then came the voting part. Everyone on the team got a certain number of votes, say, three votes each. You could put all your votes on one idea if you felt super strongly about it, or spread them out. We’d just go around, tallying up the votes next to each item. Simple, right?
How It Actually Went Down
Well, practice was a bit different. It started okay, but pretty quickly, things got… weird. You saw folks voting for the easiest tasks, not necessarily the most important ones. Or sometimes, it felt more like a popularity contest – people voted for their buddy’s idea, or the manager’s pet project.
- Gathering ideas: This part was fine, lots of stuff got suggested.
- The Voting: This is where it crumbled. People lobbied for votes. Quiet folks or less popular ideas got drowned out.
- The Results: We often ended up with a list topped by things that sounded flashy but didn’t really solve core problems. Technical debt? Important refactoring? Nah, those rarely got enough votes. They weren’t exciting enough.
I remember spending a whole month building this one feature that won big in the “Brent Peterson Votes”. We launched it. Crickets. Turned out the few people who voted hard for it were loud, but didn’t represent what users actually needed. We eventually had to rip it out. What a waste of time that was.
The Real Problem
The big issue was, this whole voting thing skipped the hard part: actual discussion and understanding. It replaced careful thinking and weighing pros and cons with just counting beans. We thought we were being democratic and quick, but we were often just picking the loudest or easiest options.
We tried tweaking it, giving different weights to votes, adding rounds of discussion, but the core problem remained. It felt like a shortcut, and like most shortcuts, it often led us down the wrong path. Eventually, we mostly moved away from it, thankfully. We started having actual conversations again, arguing things out, looking at data – you know, the stuff that actually works, even if it takes longer.
So yeah, “Brent Peterson Votes”. Tried it. Didn’t stick. It was one of those things you learn from, mostly by seeing how it doesn’t work.
