Okay, let me tell you about this thing I started calling the ‘Kevin Way’. It’s not some official process, you know, just something I picked up from watching this guy Kevin I used to work with. We were banging our heads against the wall on a project, getting bogged down in endless meetings and documentation.
I remember watching Kevin. He’d just… start building stuff. While we were busy making flowcharts, he’d have a rough version running. It looked messy, honestly. People would complain his code wasn’t ‘proper’. But somehow, he always got things moving forward when everyone else was stuck spinning their wheels.
Trying It Out
So, on this recent task, things were dragging again. Too much talk, not enough action. I thought, screw it, let’s try the Kevin Way. I just grabbed the core requirement, the absolute minimum, and started coding. Didn’t worry about the perfect structure, didn’t worry about all the edge cases yet. Just focused on making something work.
It felt really weird at first. Like I was skipping important steps. My instinct was screaming to plan more, to document first. But I pushed through. I got a basic version up and running in a day. It was ugly, had bugs, probably wouldn’t scale. But it did the main thing it needed to do.
Then, I showed it to the team. Not as a finished thing, but as a starting point. “Look, this is the basic idea,” I said. And suddenly, the conversation changed. Instead of abstract discussions, we were talking about something real, something tangible. People started pointing out specific problems, suggesting concrete improvements.
What Happened Next
Things started moving much faster after that. We iterated on that rough version. Fixed the bugs, improved the structure, added the edge cases. It was like having that first messy version broke the deadlock. We could build upon it instead of just talking about it.
- We actually saw progress daily.
- Discussions became way more productive.
- It felt less like wading through mud.
It wasn’t perfect, mind you. Sometimes Kevin’s original approach, and my copy of it, meant we had to refactor more later. If you start too messy, you might build yourself into a corner. So, it’s not a magic bullet. You still need discipline to clean up and build properly after that initial push.
But honestly? For getting unstuck? For breaking through that initial inertia? This ‘Kevin Way’ of just starting, just building something, anything, to get the ball rolling… it works surprisingly often. It’s messy, it’s rough, but sometimes that’s exactly what you need to stop talking and start doing. I find myself using it quite a bit now when things feel slow.
