A measure of the complexity of a task: how many PhDs does it require?

A scale of complexity for a task that grows by at least an order of magnitude a jump:

1) Could it be duct-taped together in a day?

2) Could it be duct-taped together in a month?

3) Could someone be granted a PhD for that work?

4) Could someone be granted a Turing Award for that work?

A successful project is a combination of tasks into a coherent and viable whole.

The risk of the project scales with the multiplication of the difficulty of each task required to get to viability.

A task that can take an already-viable thing and make it better can be a higher difficulty and not matter as much.

The viability means the thing can be in the market, creating value, while you do the work.

That allows you to be patient.

If the project succeeds, the product gets significantly better. If it doesn't, the cost is only the opportunity cost.

Larger products with larger bases of use can support larger investments into improving them.

The product is unlikely to go away, and even a small improvement for a massive number of users is important.

Google-scale infrastructure needs could support, for example, the development of Spanner.

In a fractally complicated new idea there are "PhD thesis' rabbit holes in every direction.

You only want to do the bare number of PhD thesis style projects that you need.

As the system gets more momentum, it can support more PhD theses.

A new PhD thesis as a thing that blocks the path to viability is a miracle.

A thing that good PMs know in their bones: the hard part of most new products is not the individual tasks, it's the integration.

Even if you have all of the components sitting on a shelf ready to be integrated with a day of duct tape work, they still need to be the right combination, everyone needs to do their tasks in a way that coheres, everyone needs to coordinate to do the tasks at the right time.

In a large organization, the coordination cost will be many orders of magnitude more than the actual focused implementation work.

So even if the individual tasks are all easy, the likelihood of producing a viable product quickly enough is very, very low.

Good PMs aggressively search for ideas where a possibly-viable sketch of the product could be built out of components that can be roughed in with no more than a day of uninterrupted execution.

Possibly-viable means a prototype or demo that obviously has legs and is worth developing further.

The real world (especially large organizations) rarely allows uninterrupted execution, so that "single day" will be more like a "week".

A sweet spot: use components where someone else already got the PhD for it, and now has the knowhow to make it easy to duct tape to a system in a day.

It's hard for others to do but easy for your expert to do: an asymmetric advantage, if it turns out to be useful.