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

cutle.fish

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

#11

Post by gfody »

ttoinou wrote: post #5

What's wrong with feature factory ? If you're delivering something good for clients.. No measurement / Success theater / core metrics This takes time and mental space. That you could better use to... crank a new feature! :)

it's more that they're measuring the wrong thing. wash rinse repeat here just leads to implosion due to neglecting the big picture, death by 1000 cuts, etc.

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

#13

Post by tuanis »

rubyfan wrote: post #4

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 mayb…

I actually feel like agile development can invite some of this behavior, because the focus is on shipping instead of value.

Not saying agile is bad, just feels like a separate problem.

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

#14

Post by gfody »

thomas wrote: post #9

In this framing, a factory is supposed to be bad? Aren’t factories efficient and the best way of producing things at scale?

when it comes to software you do not want to produce code at scale. the fewer lines of code the better really. it'd be like measuring the quality of your genome by counting the rungs in your dna.

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

#15

Post by vertex-four »

thomas wrote: post #9

In this framing, a factory is supposed to be bad? Aren’t factories efficient and the best way of producing things at scale?

Which is great, so long as they're not just creating debt for themselves by e.g. creating broken products that have to be recalled to be fixed by the factory.

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

#16

Post by LaGrange »

scribu wrote: post #7
ttoinou wrote: post #5

What's wrong with feature factory ? If you're delivering something good for clients.. No measurement / Success theater / core metrics This takes time and mental space. That you could better use to... crank a new feature! :)

> If you're delivering something good for clients... That's the crux of it, isn't it? How do you know that what you're delivering is any good?

Depending on the customer and the work, I might not — or, to be more precise, I might only know some aspects of the product's quality based on what the customer tells me. Or I might only directly know whether certain aspects of what I'm doing are good. Arguably that's actually always the case, but if you're doing consumer-oriented mass-market stuff, then it's quite possible that "what the producer knows" overwhelms what the "customer" knows. But not all software is something you can dogfood or A/B test, and software developers are _very_ quick to assume that they know better than customers, especially if the customer is in some way locked-in.

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

#17

Post by mongol »

thomas wrote: post #9

In this framing, a factory is supposed to be bad? Aren’t factories efficient and the best way of producing things at scale?

A factory can produce almost anything at scale, but how do you know it is worthwhile and providing the best possible value? In a "bad" factory, the "factory workers" are like cogs in a machine and have no influence over what is built. There is someone ordering to build this or that and they produce it. Feature factory is in this terminology should be seen as opposed an alternative process, where the "factory workers" themselves decide what to produce and how, and as long as the measured value stacks up, it will be more efficient and derive more shareholder value than the "feature factory".

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

#18

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

davzie wrote: post #10

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.

The problem is that, if you're churning out features without thinking critically about why, your work might not even change the company. I've seen engineers, teams, even entire departments spend multiple quarters being a net drain on the company. But they never noticed, because they kept consistently defining release targets and hitting them.

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

#19

Post by itronitron »

rubyfan wrote: post #4

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 mayb…

I'm waiting for the inevitable open office plan that has a conveyor along it's primary axis for moving white boards along the production path, like in a modern factory. There can be a sub-team that programs robotic arms to sketch things on the white boards as they pass each stage.

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

#20

Post by gfody »

gfodor wrote: post #12

Somebody asks for a feature, you build it, they pay you — that’s data. Data isn’t just spying on your users to see how they behave.

A big part of product management's function is buffering all the features being asked for so that they can take a step back and design a solution that isn't just 100 new features. The feature factory process is mostly a symptom of product being bad at their job.
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