Any manager who doesn’t have a clear objective (or fail to communicate one) is destined for disappointment. It is critical to have a mutual understanding of expectations between team members when dealing with tasks.
Some so-called managers don’t even bother providing a vision since they feel that just by hacking away at things, things will get done. Not quite. Sure, there’s such a thing as giving people the latitude for them to be creative and work their magic but ill-defined requirements and goals can lead to frustration.
So this designer was toiling away about almost a good two weeks doing an almost full-render of an app interface. He’s already done a sleek and sexy interface that’s quite ready to be integrated with the code if there was one. Then, at the end of two weeks, the project lead and his supervisor check up on him.
The project lead then starts quizzing him about what this screen would show and what this button would bring do. The design supervisor then makes comments about. The poor designer can’t quite answer back. He wasn’t told any other detail than create an interface based on some generic descriptions.
At the end of it all, the project lead decides that he’ll have to make a wireframe of sorts for the interface. The poor designer is left scratching his head and twiddle his thumbs. He’ll just have to wait for the wireframe and re-do his work while the project lead feels like he has to play hero to get this task moving.
It’s like telling someone to “cook pasta.” They cook one heck of a batch of meatball spaghetti in tomato sauce then you come in, critiquing and commenting that the pasta should’ve been wider and chewier, with more cheese, and baked instead. Then you end up describing lasagna. You wanted lasagna but just asked for any pasta. And then you have the cook start all over again. If it were a vindictive cook, I wouldn’t be surprised if that cook just poisoned you instead.