> I’m curious if you could give some examples of what you’re thinking of, the situations where there’s 0 payoff until all the work is done

Not op, but surgery strikes me as an example where there's effectively 0 pay-off until you finish everything. I personally wouldn't want the surgeon to sack it off without sewing me back up.

It surely depends on exactly what surgery we’re talking about, but surgery has lots and lots of known variation. Open brain and heart surgery might be good examples of what you’re talking about, but surgery in general is one of the best examples of non-flat distributions with non-binary outcomes. Some surgeries can be abandoned in the middle without stitching the patient, and some people will survive even if most die. Heard a fun podcast just yesterday about fistulated stomachs and the stories of a couple of different people who’ve had them. Surgeons can do a mediocre job stitching and fail to clean everything and there will be a mix of outcomes. They can do a perfect job, and most people will live, but still a few will die anyway.

The minimum viable product concept comes to mind. You don't have a product until you invest the effort required to pass the minimum threshold.

Another example I can think of is escape velocity. I'd venture that the principle you're asking for is "phase change", where a threshold gates a drastic change in behavior.

Isn’t MVP the canonical example of attempting to get some payout while specifically not doing all the work? It is by definition unfinished, and so not doing all the work yet. And the idea is to hit the threshold yeah, but what makes a product minimally viable is notoriously murky and difficult to pin down. “Viable” is pretty much always a subjective metric, it depends on your financial situation and runway. From experience with my own startup, there absolutely was a distribution of behaviors for different MVP effort levels, and the product was never 100% done, but we had paying customers, and doing more of the right kind of work increased the number of paying customers.

Phase change in physics certainly is an example of a narrow peaky distribution, I’m just not sure how often that kind of distribution is a reality for human behavior, which is what the top comment was reacting and referring to. I can think of a few and was just arguing they exist in another thread elsewhere when it comes to pricing and consumption for scarce-resource high-demand economics. So they’re out there, but I’d be pretty hard-pressed to agree that these are common enough to make claims that they’re equal to distributions with lots of variation. It feels like the top comment was making an assumption, arguing that the Pareto principle is a made-up idea that’s just as common as other made-up ideas, but that’s not really true.

Thing is, the Pareto principle is not so very useful for a SW engineer. It's merely a mathematical fact. If we focus on the 80 percent that only takes an easy peasy 20 percent of effort, there's no product to deliver. The devil is in the details, details we need.