Signs you’re working in a feature factory (2016)

What do I do if upper management seems to be driving this process?

Much of this describes some of my past experience at a Fortune 100. That company is now undergoing much discussion at a senior level about agile delivery. Senior executives are walking around talking about tribes and chapters and have no idea what that really means or of the day to day work of teams. It’s unfortunate what will come out of it in the end is some people doing stuff now that will have new titles and maybe more ceremonies but not a substantive change from what they do now or the way work gets done.

Middle management thinks they work in a factory and treat people like numbers. If you trust the same group of people to implement the change then you can bet their sole goal is to make it look good. Unless you change the middle then not much will change.

unfortunately this is almost every place i've ever worked. so many good points here - but the most poignant for me is "celebrating shipping" vs celebrating customer success ... so true

Feature addiction is real.

This post points to perverse economic incentives as being one possible cause, but I have also seen this happen in open-source projects. It's a matter of listening to the wrong people, in my view. User feedback is incredibly valuable, but when user feedback comes in the form of GitHub issues rather than careful testing and conversation, the team will inevitably find themselves building more and more and more for no real benefit.

I've quoted this before, but what Don Norman says in The Invisible Computer still applies:

"Don’t ask people what they want. Watch them and figure out their needs. If you ask, people usually focus on what they have and ask for it to be better: cheaper, faster, smaller. A good observer might discover that the task is unnecessary, that it is possible to restructure things or provide a new technology that eliminates the painstaking parts of their procedures. If you just follow what people ask for, you could end up making their lives even more complicated."

I don't actually understand what's bad about this, maybe someone who is in a company like this can explain why it's a negative? I am working with a company that is moving more towards this approach and I'm really enjoying it. Isn't this essentially what Basecamp's Shape Up method advocates for? Not everyone feels they need to be building something that changes the world I suppose. Each to their own.