“We want to hire engineers because we don’t have enough development resources.” Don’t you hear this often?

“We’re busy, so we just don’t have enough engineers…” As an engineer myself, I understand this well. When we’re busy, we tend to think “Maybe hiring a few engineers will solve it?”

However, I experienced something that made me think “Why not first review the work that’s keeping you busy?” So I decided to write this article.

First Consult on Projects That Require a Lot of Development Work

Haven't you ever discovered during development that a project requires an enormous amount of development work?

What we often tend to do is complete the project by exceeding the development hours just because “it’s a request from management, so we can’t refuse.”

This is a poor decision because the Go decision was made based on the initially presented development hours, so if those hours are exceeded, you need to consult appropriately or the cost-effectiveness won’t match.

I think if it’s your own business development, you can get more flexible responses to the judgment that “if it takes that much development work, we don’t need to handle it.”

Propose Service Termination and Feature Reduction

"The number of engineers is totally insufficient for the services and development we're currently doing."

When faced with such a situation, there’s one action you can take quickly.

That is to identify services that require a lot of development and operational work from a technical perspective, propose them to people with business-side authority, and reduce the work to be done.

Based on that proposal, reasonable business-side people should be able to make appropriate decisions: “service termination,” “feature deletion,” or “continuation.”

If things move toward termination or reduction, you might find that the engineers you currently have can still do much more development, leading to the conclusion that you don’t need to hire engineers immediately.

Finally, Decide on Engineer Hiring

If, as a result of your proposal, there are no services to terminate or features to delete, that's very happy news for engineers. Because it means all the code you've written still has value. In this case, the work won't decrease, so you should decide to hire engineers.

This way, thinking with a balanced approach using the two axes of “engineer hiring” and “service/feature continuation” should broaden your range of options.

That’s all from the Gemba.