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

> Change jobs if you must

Or if a new job can offer you a better deal. If these jobs are all interchangeable, then you may as well interchange them for what benefits you most.

Yes! Very well put together list because at my last role (in the same company) this was essentially what I was trying to escape and when I look at the work that team is doing, it’s not impactful or noticeable but the devs are always building some new complex thing that won’t even see the light of day once.

On my current team, feature building is the second to last step (right before a retro) because product development requires many non-coding steps to first understand problem. Some times, I believe it should be “problem solving” instead of “product development”.

I'm part of the technical leadership at a company who is transitioning from small to medium-sized company. This article is disparaging virtually all of the initiatives we're trying to actually implement.

It's actually really hard to transition from anarchy into a more process-oriented where each person has a role to play so that Devs are no longer responsible for literally everything because everyone is used to Devs doing everything. PMs used to verbally communicate vague ideas of what the customer was looking for and it was up to us to interpret and decompose and deliver on dates agreed upon without our input.

There is a reason that the points in this article exist at all - because the alternative is actually worse!

There are lots of bad actor reasons (putting career advancement ahead of product success), but there also structural issues that can lead teams to operate this way.

The most common: product decisions are made higher up by well intentioned leaders who lack the product management expertise and the context the team does.

Usually this looks something like a sales person hearing from a couple of customers “we really need feature X”. The sales person doesn’t ask what actual problem they’re trying to solve but instead reports back “the market is telling me we need X!!”. An executive picks this up, writes a business case, and then hands a solution (build X) instead of the problem (our customers are struggling with Y) to a product manager. That PM is no longer really empowered to think about the overall outcomes but rather is tasked with discovering requirements and then project managing the feature through.

At some companies this is how all product decisions are made. It’s not that there is no thought about benefit, it’s that the wrong people are the ones doing the thinking and as a result you end up with teams who spends years never delivering anything actually valuable to their users.

Ultimately it isn't an engineer's place to complain if they're working for a product that needs 100 more features to succeed in a competitive marketplace and win over customers.

I had the exact same reaction as you to this article after seeing it again, and wanted to share why I've also changed my mind on this. I was in "a feature factory" for few years and absolutely hated it. After leaving and going to a "not-feature factory" AKA "employee-happiness machine", I miss the feature factory.

Imagine you're building a Great Pyramid with 100 workers. The workers can't see the Pyramid and don't care about why a Pyramid is important. Is there time to explain to each worker exactly why they're moving a specific block? What about time to "review" why that one block didn't fit?

"Real work is always a bit messy"

Would you care about anything else other than how quickly each block got into place? The Pyramid can only be completed when all the blocks are in place, and most importantly- each block doesn't have to sit perfectly, and also, you can get by without ever delivering a "perfect block".

This is why product managers will never be 100% aligned with engineers. Product managers see "is the block there" and engineers see "is the block perfectly set" and "why am I not being appreciated?" and "why do they only care about putting down blocks".

It's bizarre to read how this person is so opposed to "up and to the right", that's the key indicator of you business and what will pay your bills. Yes, everyone is always going to be obsessed with revenue and you will never stop hearing about it.

Of course as an engineer- Resolve tech debt. You have to. But from the view at the top, it's a very temporary detour and needs to be resolved quickly so they can continue pumping out features.

Yes, I am making the analogy that engineers should accept being a "slave" to the product manager, or more directly, the product itself.