How long was the discovery and design document phase on the 2 year project?
Some sketch of the end-design is always important, thinking about major components and future evolution, but a detailed plan has never been worth it in my line of work.
The most generous way to view what you described is that you’ve had to cancel your project half way through and start a new one. There’s nothing you can do to make business decisions like that work smoothly. In my experience though, a more likely cause of what you’ve described, is that the project was just planned poorly to begin with.
The kind of problem we have when launching a new product is that we can have a well-defined list of everything that is required of the new product to be assured of successf - it's going to take 5 years to build that, with at least 20 people.
What can we cut and still have a successful product, that we can launch in say 1 year (or 6 months) with say 10 people? That is much harder to say, and different product leaders have different opinions, based on discussions with different clients. And the consensus opinion may simply change.
So sure, the architecture is generally driven towards that 5 year product idea, but the short term estimates are always going to be geared towards a specific subset of that. And that subset is easily subject to change, from one quarter to another. We won't throw away the design if that happens, but we will definitely throw away any longer-term estimates.
And charting out a 5-year plan that we would only 're-jig' as priorities change would be a recipe for certain failure - teams change, people leave, etc. You can't hope to have an accurate estimate on that time horizon.
> a well-defined list of everything that is required of the new product to be assured of success
Only bad software tries to be everything to everybody (not to shit on bad software, it’s a multi-billion dollar industry). Your customers have a problem that other products weren’t solving, your solution to this problem is the core of your value proposition. It’s the only thing you need to implement to launch your product, everything else can be added iteratively over time. If you don’t know what that problem is, then you’ve failed before you’ve even started. You’re not driving your company forward by writing code as soon as possible, you’re just doing skids in the parking lot.
I’ve seen so many people get sucked into the fiction that their product is by necessity too complex to plan and design properly. In reality I’ve never seen it to be anything other than a cover for not actually knowing how to run a product well. You’re not saving any time by making it up as you go. All of the design decisions you need to make still need to be made, you can choose to make them in a controlled manner, or just do it randomly and hope you pull through. But good design is not an emergent outcome of the resources you devote to implementation.
Most work can fit within quarters and get executed quickly, but it takes something else to have long term vision.
The discovery process was paying attention and looking at what is actually the goal, and it generally requires the discipline to slow down and focus on the future without giving into the short term time sinks.
I had the benefit of 70-100 minutes per day of being stuck on a boat commuting for years to focus on discovery. The particular project that had a two year vision had about six months of shit to eat in office while thinking and planning on the commuter boat. It is amazing what one can accomplish by simply writing and the time to focus.