Wishful thinking - a programming skill that every entrepreneur should learn

Wishful thinking is a programming practice where a programmer abstracts out all complexities.

As an entrepreneur when you are taking that leap towards a goal or strategy, a lot of times one has the urge to have as much implementation detail of each piece to feel comfortable sometimes that urge itself becomes a big barrier to start.

Here is a simplified example of how a programmer might abstract some of the things if we were building the published post featured on LinkedIn.

Here I can abstract out most of the sub-problems and expand on the one. Once I am done with getDataForCreatePost, I can then move to implementing a solution for the next problem.

PostService {

    def getUserPosts(User user) {
        return [];
    } 
                    
    def getReadingIdeas() {
        return [
            'Wishful thinking for entrepreneurs',
            'Introduction to Grails for Ruby On Rails developer',
            'Deming's Philosophy - Continuous Improvement'
        ]
    }
    
    def getDataForCreatePost() {
        return [ideas: getReadingIdeas(), userPosts: getUserPosts()];
    }
}

In the above example, I have abstracted out getUserPosts and getReadingIdeas by simply returning a fixed set of values (i.e. hard coded). I can now focus on implementing getDataForCreatePost

Let’s take a look at using Wishful Thinking applied to a business problem, “Making hiring inbound”. Let’s first divide the problem into few sub-problems

1. Relevant technical blogs so developers can find us
2. How to videos
3. Interesting programming challenges for developers to solve and submit for being considered for engineering roles

I can abstract or stub out most of these and then expand on one. For example:

1. Source relevant technical articles by others, to share on company LinkedIn page
2. Source “How To” videos to share on all our social channels
3. Provide a link to a public Google spreadsheet with a list of challenges developers can play with

Now all these abstracted/stubbed out solutions don’t really solve the problem completely but get us somewhere closer.

Now I can pick one of the above sub-problem that is a higher priority and dive into breaking it down further.

If you practice Lean Startup some of this might sound familiar. When building a Concierge MVP you will really need to bring your “A” game in abstraction.

Would love to hear your experiences using brain tricks to move faster.