As I'm sure you're aware, by virtue of my job's scope I sometimes find areas of attention where a little bit of engineering work would result in a reasonably sized improvement from a product and user experience standpoint. Often these problems are ill-defined by the user reporting them, which obscures the actual simplicity of the problem and deters engineers from working on them.

I have been raising these issues from time to time in our weekly meetings. I've thought about that, and decided that that meeting is long enough already without me trying to cram more into it. I think a large part of the lukewarm response I get trying to recruit people to do these things is due to the forum I'm raising these issues in. So I've got an alternative solution: product microtasks™ [1].

Product microtasks are problems that have been reported by a user that I have assessed, prioritised, and defined a clear-cut engineering solution for. If you're stuck on your current project and want something else to work on to cleanse your programming palate, you can do one of these. The intention for these is that they're little discrete chunks of work that are easy for you to pick up and not have to worry about defining the solution, just implementing it.

The list can be found at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Platform_product_microtasks, and could be thought of as "annoying little bugs for more experienced developers".

Be warned, I may still bug people from time to time to attend to specific issues. That is a sign of love and a mark of respect. Really. ;-)

Thanks,

Dan

[1]: Yeah, alright, you got me. I've not actually trademarked it. Don't spoil my fun. :-(
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