Turning Turds into Diamonds: The 5 Cs of Engineering Value 💎💩

When it comes to evaluating engineering effort, people love to count the hours, the story points, the lines of code—as if effort alone equals value. Spoiler: it doesn’t.

Great outcomes in engineering, like great diamonds, are judged by more than raw material. In gemology, a diamond’s value is defined by the 4 Cs: Cut, Color, Clarity, and Carat. Add Cost, and you’ve got a pretty solid framework for evaluating engineering and product work, too.

Let’s break it down—facet by facet. (See what I did there?)

💎 Cut → Craftsmanship & Execution

The brilliance of a diamond comes from how well it's cut—not just the raw stone. Engineering is no different. Craft matters. Execution matters. No one cares how many hours you spent if it’s a janky mess.

Key Question:
Is this solution expertly crafted and efficient, or just functional?

Common Pitfalls:

• Rushing to deliver without cleaning up the mess
• Premature abstractions or gold-plating edge cases
• Shipping code no one wants to maintain
• Reinventing the wheel for no good reason

🎯 Color → User and Business Impact

Colorless diamonds are more valuable because they’re pure. In product work, color is distraction. The more focused the effort on a clear problem, the higher the value. If your feature is pretty but pointless, it’s just glitter.

Key Question:
Does this effort solve a real, meaningful problem—or is it just noise?

Common Pitfalls:

• Building features for imaginary users
• Tacking on “nice-to-haves” before nailing the basics
• Doing work that looks good in a demo but solves nothing
• Saying “yes” to everything instead of choosing wisely

👁️ Clarity → Transparency & Understandability

Clarity means no hidden flaws in a diamond. In engineering, clarity is what makes your code, your system, and your decisions understandable and maintainable. It’s the gift that keeps on giving—long after you’ve left the team.

Key Question:
Can others easily understand, use, and build upon this work?

Common Pitfalls:

• “Clever” code that’s unreadable
• Lack of documentation, comments, or rationale
• Decisions made in Slack DMs and forgotten forever
• Tribal knowledge bottlenecked to one person

⚖️ Carat → Scope & Weight of Impact

Carat is about weight. Same goes for your project—how much impact did it really have? Big rocks get noticed. But not every feature needs to be massive to matter.

Key Question:
How significant is the outcome relative to the investment?

Common Pitfalls:

• Confusing effort with impact
• Overengineering low-priority features
• Shipping something flashy but functionally unused
• Taking the long road to build something already available off-the-shelf

💸 Cost → Effort vs Return

Diamonds are pricey. But so is engineering—especially when the return doesn’t match the spend. It’s not just time and money. It’s the cost of not doing something better.

Key Question:
Was the juice worth the squeeze?

Common Pitfalls:

• Sunk-cost fallacy: finishing it “because we started it”
• Prioritizing perfection over shipping
• Draining team morale on high-effort, low-payoff projects
• Ignoring maintenance and operational costs down the line

🧠 Final Thought: From 💩 to 💎

Effort is only part of the equation. Value is multifaceted. And with the right execution, alignment, clarity, impact, and cost management, you can make almost anything shine.

Yes—even a turd, under enough pressure, can become a diamond.
But wouldn't you rather mine smarter?