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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)

#221

Post by tcbasche »

pjc50 wrote: post #174
joshspankit wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not saying this to argue against your points: I’m a fan of Tangerine bank and have been continually and loudly telling them to remove the balances on the account overview screen as it now triggers “burning a hole in my pocket” psychology. I only mean to say at least a few fans are actively asking for things to be removed, simplified, and (thoughtfully) refined.

Conversely, I'd consider an account overview without a balance to be useless. That's what an overview is for. shrug

Yeah ING lets you see the balance without having to log in, and sometimes it's great to just check how it's going

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

#222

Post by hitekker »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #217
sfink wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortunately, the author wrote a great many other articles that go far further. It seems to me like the article is fine for what it is, it's just calling out a problematic pattern that commonly exists. It doesn't pretend to prescribe that to fix this pattern you need to do the opposite of every one of his bullet points. He instead writes lots of other articles dealing with the nuances of how to do better. But it also…

> But it also sounds that you're worried about engineers constantly challenging product manager's decisions? No, that's the exact opposite of what I said. In fact, I explicitly ended my post with a call to action for engineers to communicate concerns, suggestions, and questions to their product managers. > It doesn't pretend to prescribe that to fix this pattern you need to do the opposite of every one of his bullet…

> without taking steps to become more involved

It’s must be pretty comfortable to assume that the engineers here have never tried giving feedback in their workplace.

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

#223

Post by texasbigdata »

fogetti wrote: post #211

Sadly this is the case in our company. I worked as a dev team manager for the last 9 months and I was constantly wondering why do we work on these features... The more time I spent with our CEO though, it turned out that he wanted to decide everything feature-wise. When I proposed that we should maybe do some market research or user interviews instead, he boldly declared that he knows the market the best. So go figur…

Jesus dude.

Maybe you're spot on 100% right in terms of vision, in terms of business plan, in terms of psychological blindspots, in terms of product market fit, in terms of a path to profitability. You seem pretty smart so maybe it is fairly insulting to you to not be listened to.

In what way is your world view helpful? And I want to be be gentle here, and not mean harm. In what way is it helpful for yourself, for your own wellbeing?

Let's say you could fix the company and stop the losses. Then trying to do that seems worth pursuing. Let's say you can't! We've all come across situations hard and unmoveable. So now, unless some break happens for you (because it's unlikely they will wake up and listen to you if they never did before...just a pragmatic observation), you are stuck being chronicly slightly unhappy.

It's not my place to suggest, and I'm trying to respectfully ask, would either maybe letting go or conversely doubling down and standing up for yourself and finding another job where they value you hurt you less? Completly serious question because everyone deserves to be happy.

And also, a bit of conjecture, but if you're not profitable it's that same CEOs ability to communicate a vision that's funding payroll right? I'm not saying absolve him of every misgrievance because if the company isn't doing well it's ultimately on his shoulders.

My point is maybe there's a softer path to walk here....?

Not my place to ask though.

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

#224

Post by hnuser123456 »

emodendroket wrote: post #206
undefined1 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A useful metaphor we use in game dev: Players are the patient, you are the doctor. They're great at finding pain, but not at knowing how to heal it. It's on you to figure out what the underlying problem is and how to solve it. Also, some of my favorite quotes on this subject: You listen to all your fans and they always say "You should add this" or "You should add that." They never say "Take this out, take that out."…

I don't know, sometimes I enjoy the very cluttered and busy design of something like Yakuza 5.

Similarly, GTA V is successful and complex. But Untitled Goose Game didn't do too bad either.

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

#225

Post by 0x445442 »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #195
BlueTemplar wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultimately, we might be running into the issue that the impact is spread over time and cannot be condensed into a single ROI number ?

Impact is spread over time and multiple vectors. So now you have three problems in addition to getting working code the door - prioritising proposed features based on estimates of value, finding accurate metrics for assessing value after release, and mapping value changes over time. The nice thing about feature-driven-development is that it avoids the hard work of having to understand what you're actually doing. You…

I have no data to back this up but I'd say the majority of projects I've worked on during my career my time would have been better spent working on things that made the development teams more efficient. That is to say, with rare exception, I don't think the software actually generated anywhere near the benefit it cost to develop and maintain.

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

#226

Post by rhizome »

bob33212 wrote: post #136
userium wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Feature factories build features based on random assumptions, and not based on actual data. I just wrote about this yesterday ( https://teamsuccess.io/hdd ). I work as a consultant with lots of Scrum teams, and many devs feel like they're just sitting in the factory, cranking out features. Without knowing whether they're adding real value to the end-user. So what can you do to break free from the feature fac…

In my experience people are afraid to ask that question. The answer to that question may lead to questions around total addressable market which could cause uppermanagement to question the viability of the product or at least the cost / benefit of having a big development and product management team in the first place.

Afraid with good reason. I think it's more likely that it would be seen as disrespectful to managment, product, bizdev, etc. who asked for it. That it's challenging their judgement.

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

#227

Post by SeyelentEco »

BigJono wrote: post #210
titanomachy wrote: post #182

I've never worked somewhere that could actually take a concept to a complete, well-tested feature delivered to users in a two week sprint. I've worked at little startups and a medium-sized tech company as well as FAANG. In each case, we spent most of our time working on projects with 2-3 month time horizons. The small and medium companies called their development strategy "agile". In FAANG we mostly just did our work…

> I've worked at little startups and a medium-sized tech company as well as FAANG. In each case, we spent most of our time working on projects with 2-3 month time horizons. The small and medium companies called their development strategy "agile". In FAANG we mostly just did our work and didn't spend any time on the Kafkaesque exercise of "sprint retrospectives" and "grooming sessions". Our product manager didn't tell…

I agree with the parent poster. I've spent 6+ years at FB and the whole time I've just worked on what I thought was important. No one was ever assigned a project to me. The process normally involves managers and PMs highlighting problems and potential solutions and then developers picking projects that interest them. It sounds crazy but it is a controlled chaos. We incent people to work on non-sexy work by aligning with performance reviews. So everyone is required to show some better engineering impact (like writing documentation, unit or integration tests, cleaning up deprecated code etc).

It's the longest I've stayed at a company (worked a decade at startups and web dev companies) because of the freedom to constantly work on things that are interesting. For example I've changed the type of developer I am twice since joining.

So if it's worth a look if that's a style that works for you.

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

#228

Post by IanCal »

sbr464 wrote: post #180
nicksergeant wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're asking a bank to remove visible account balances from a dashboard view?

I think it’s a valid request. I wish Apple’s iMessage App would allow hiding or moving conversations to folders to remove from sight. I may have an emotional or upsetting text with someone that I don’t necessarily want to see every time I open the app, but also don’t want to delete it. Or may need to use my phone in a presentation etc, and not want to show certain messages.

However adding an option to remove it as adding a feature, not taking one away.

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

#229

Post by picubedplus1 »

hnuser123456 wrote: post #224
emodendroket wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, sometimes I enjoy the very cluttered and busy design of something like Yakuza 5.

Similarly, GTA V is successful and complex. But Untitled Goose Game didn't do too bad either.

There's upsides and downsides to complex and simple games. Fortnite may be simple in some aspects (basically a war game) but it's more complex than Temple Run.

Both cater to different markets but achieve simplicity within their markets well.

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

#230

Post by gfody »

lr4444lr wrote: post #36

Sigh... At some point, most healthy adults who are not living in terrible circumstances come to the mature realization and compromise that their job is largely to produce value for someone else, not to be the primary source of personal fulfillment, and they come to understand that there is dignity in being productive, if not creative. Be creative on your own time. Lead a civic group. Be a good parent. Volunteer at a…

This is the Nirvana fallacy. It's not some rare exception to be producing value for someone else while achieving personal fulfillment.
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