What should I do next?
I hear this question a lot. Five words and it sounds so simple.
It's not.
What does "next" mean?
Next sprint? Next week? Next year? Next from your list? From the backlog?
The question is deceitfully simple and it usually begs for an apparently trivial answer. If you fall into that trap, you'll might end up working on the right thing just because it's next on some list.
When we ask "What should I do next?" we're really asking "What's most important right now?" And "for whom?" Without this, we're not asking the full question.
Today, you have an endless list of choices. Tomorrow, it's endless times two. The bad news is that the more you postpone your choice on what to work on next, the worse it's going to get.
And the answer isn't to just pick something without consciously considering the implications of what you're building and for whom. And every time you pick what to build next, you're also choosing who gets to use it. And who doesn't.
Sometimes, you make picks thousands of times a day, without even knowing.
You choose a font size and some colours that look good. You choose to use a trendy animation. You choose placeholder text. You choose to prioritise the happy path over what happens when things go wrong. You choose to assume everyone has steady hands, perfect vision and fast internet. You choose to write documentation that requires a college reading level.
You choose to build for the device you use, not the one your users can afford.
And one pick at a time, one next at a time, and you've chosen how to spend the rest of your life.