[HN Gopher] How many of you know that the team is working on som...
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How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-
one wants?
Author : kiyanwang
Score : 40 points
Date : 2020-06-15 07:05 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (iism.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (iism.org)
| SnarkRUs wrote:
| I was cheering a little inside while reading this and agreeing
| mightily until I realized it was an ad. Boo.
| rigel_kentaurus wrote:
| True, but I think we can separate the idea from the
| person/company.
|
| The problem statement is very well written. The Director of
| Engineering rotating because they can't deliver, and the battle
| between Product and Engineering.
|
| Conclusion is rushed, but it boils down to what agile advocates
| at the core: product manager and QA need to be in the room
| along with engineering.
|
| It is until they hear daily about the challenges, first hand,
| and they see the struggle that it makes sense. Does not matter
| how many reports the PM does, first have seeing why technical
| debt is making things slow is invaluable.
|
| Only addition I would add is: there is a reason why sprint
| waterfalls exist. You can't iterate forever, and someone needs
| to play the role of the mature person that knows when something
| is good enough and needs to be shipped. I think Agile as a
| framework is at its limits. We need something that lets us run
| the engineering but at the same time becomes more predictable
| to business.
| nurettin wrote:
| > Don't just build Something(tm), build an industry leading
| product that customers want and love!
|
| The point of writing software is to get paid. If the process
| leads to something actually useful, good on you. If not, you
| still got paid. It was just a drill, life continues.
| [deleted]
| mathewsanders wrote:
| "Agile teams that truly iterate with the customer can often avoid
| these problems because the customer is there the whole way
| through and the team continuously pivots to close gaps discovered
| by the customer throughout the project, thereby building
| something the customer actually needs and wants."
|
| I'm 2 years into my first role as a product owner (made the
| switch from design) and working at a fortune 100. The thing
| that's struck me most since starting this role is that as while
| the company has invested more to our transition to agile teams
| (hiring external agile transformation companies, everyone goes
| through scrum training etc) we seem to have distanced ourselves
| even further from the customer.
|
| I report to a product manager, who I think in turn has had zero
| hours interacting directly with our customers or our users. Our
| roadmap seems completely driven based on whatever features seem
| to be flavor of the month (or quarter since we do roadmap
| planning quarterly) and it's been a struggle to even try and get
| buy in to having our customers represented in some way by proxy
| (e.g. through personas, or setting product metrics that attempt
| to measure customer value). Features that we do release have no
| expectations around what is considered successful usage (usage
| will be measured, but without context, so if 5% of customers use
| a feature there's no interpretation if this is really low, or
| really high).
|
| The puzzling thing is that when I talk to my manager (or managers
| manager) about this disconnect, they seem to agree in principle,
| and that we _should_ be doing these things but no one ever does.
|
| I've been told that someone in leadership described me as being
| too "black and white" in this area, but I consider myself both
| pragmatic and flexible to alternative ideas.
|
| Because I'm still new to this role, I wonder if I'm being naive
| or idealistic around how we approach our feature development, or
| if this is just how most companies operate.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Customers can be a nightmare simply because they don't want to
| be closely involved and on their end, they usually are not
| engineers so the requirements can easily not make sense.
|
| I don't blame people for avoiding such tasks, especially in a
| Fortune 100. The bigger the company, the more diffuse
| responsibility and the harder it is to steer the ship anyway.
| hangonhn wrote:
| I worked at a big tech company many years ago and it's
| precisely this disconnect that I will never work for a big
| successful company again. Successful companies tend to have a
| lot of "buffer" in terms of resources so they feel no urgency
| to ensure that resources and time are allocated to something
| meaningful. The objectives of middle managers are often not
| aligned with the companies. I've been on projects that were
| delivered on time and under budget only to be canned just
| before shipping because after two years the market has shifted.
| No one in those two years felt the need to change anything or
| make the hard decisions. Rather it was easier to just act like
| everything is fine until the last possible moment after wasting
| 2 years of worth of engineering resources with 50 engineers.
| The problem isn't you.
| davidgerard wrote:
| I had one of these, I found my writeup again today. It had an
| embedded copy of OpenOffice to read .doc files.
| https://reddragdiva.dreamwidth.org/599841.html Also, the
| specification implicitly required the implementation of strong
| artificial intelligence.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > Don't just build Something(tm), build an industry leading
| product that customers want and love!
|
| One of the biggest challenges is that someone eventually has to
| say "no" for that to happen. It is easier to just say yes to
| whatever is wanted than fight with someone about doing it.
| democracy wrote:
| Words of wisdom and experience - I am with you on that one
| bluedino wrote:
| Team 1 and team 2 both internally compete for projects at the
| same company.
|
| Team 1 already knows their project won't be "bought", but they
| can't start on a new project yet, so what's the point of wasting
| developer time on it?
| worriedformyjob wrote:
| Obviously using a throwaway here. Our board members got it into
| their heads that successful companies must have an AI "play", so
| they instructed the CEO to invest about 10% of our development
| budget on AI.
|
| We are doing absolutely inane projects that have no hope of
| succeeding.
|
| We serve a niche industry where certified professionals have to
| do certain tasks personally, instead of being able to delegate to
| secretaries. Somehow our CEO has been convinced that AI can be
| trained to do these tasks, at a reliability level not achievable
| by other humans.
|
| Team motivation is in a weird space: everyone is relaxed because
| there is no pressure to succeed - we all know the project will
| fail unless someone develops well-perfoming, human-level AGI
| before Q4/2020. Lots of long lunches and checking out early in
| the afternoon.
|
| At the same time, everyone is worried how terrible the fallout is
| going to be once the project reaches its inevitable conclusion.
|
| Interesting times, but at least we can now tell investors we are
| a keen company with an AI play up our sleeve!
| democracy wrote:
| Many of the features can be a total waste of time, true, once we
| spent 3/4 of a budget building UI for the product whose biggest
| customers (95% profit) never used UI. But then again, business
| plans change, some features need to be customer-tested, etc.
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