Ram Tripathi

People who build engineers, founders, and designers in their rawest form tend not to care much about sizings. This is not because sizing is useless, but because it exists in a different mental universe. Sizing is about prediction, abstraction, and reassurance. Building is about motion.

Sizing assumes a largely static world. It assumes demand can be forecast, behavior can be inferred, and outcomes can be estimated in advance. Building assumes the opposite. Building changes the system it enters. A new tool, feature, or workflow alters incentives, unlocks behaviors, and creates chains of events that were not visible beforehand. The moment something meaningful is built, the original sizing often becomes wrong.

Builders are pulled forward by a clear internal picture. A system that should exist. A tool that feels inevitable. A problem that refuses to go away. When someone is in that state of creative momentum, sizing feels like friction. It asks them to stop moving and justify the work in a language that cannot yet describe it. The builder instinct says try it, prototype it, push on it. The truth will reveal itself through contact with reality.

This is where many engineers get stuck. Often they are told they cannot build because there is no sizing. What is missed is that sizing and data are not prerequisites to building. They are outputs of it. Waiting for them often means waiting forever, or worse, preserving assumptions that will never be tested.

Static sizing treats the world as fixed. It does not account for the fact that a feature can reshape demand, create new markets, or render old metrics irrelevant. It assumes you will not disrupt the fabric of the system. But the most valuable work almost always does. When that happens, early estimates are not just imprecise, they are misleading.

Ironically, builders tend to produce better sizing by building than by estimating. A few hours of experimentation can replace days of discussion. A rough prototype can expose real constraints, reveal unexpected shortcuts, and surface opportunities no forecast would have predicted. Instrumentation on something real produces more insight than a polished model built on assumptions.

This does not mean builders are reckless or that planning has no value. It means builders experience the world through capability rather than forecasting. They want to know if something can be done, how it feels in practice, where it breaks, and what emerges when it is pushed. Data is not something handed to them. It is something they generate as part of the work.

For builders, sizing is an artifact. It comes after understanding, not before it. It is a description of terrain already explored, not a guess about land never seen.

Managers and planners naturally ask how long will this take. Builders ask what happens if we try. History shows that progress belongs more often to the latter. The people who move systems forward are those who build first, learn quickly, and let reality do the sizing.