How to Lead Your Team When the House Is on Fire

> Honestly? IME, this is about the ONLY environment where the Agile stuff makes sense. It's just such a very, very, very poor fit for long-running projects that require continuous work that may extend for decades.

I disagree. Like, I was just working at a place that did both analytics consultancy and in-house products. Go. Speak. To. User. worked in both.

For consultancy, yeah we had to go off and sit with the customer and figure out with them exactly what they needed. Do iterative PoCs. Eventually work out, together, what the 'user'/customer wanted to get out of the project(s).

For product, I sat down with one of the lead scientists and asked her what she actually wants. Like, be real with me. It's me here. I don't care if you want to use the products or not. I want to help you do the job you want to do and help you solve those problems you face on a daily basis. What will help you do this.

Answer: Bin the vaporware in-house software product and move to an established off-the-shelf third party system (Benchling).

Repeated the same thing with Data Science.

(Eventual) Answer: Bin the vaporware in-house software product and move to an established off-the-shelf third party system (databricks).

Of course, that didn't fly with the management people who wanted their magical 'guaranteed revenue stream' (which didn't exist). They weren't Go. Speak. To. User.-ing. So they were divorced from the reality of what was going on and stuck in the blue sky management vision.

Agile-manifesto-agile doesn't just apply to engineering. You can apply the principles of Go. Speak. To. User. And. Stop. Making. Gantt. Charts. To. Solve. The. Real. Problem. to a lot of places.

So many of the current apps we use now have been buried in adware and bloat due to the decisions of non-visionary minds leading as product owners... Most notably with Twitter/X, and frankly, it frustrates everyone and scuttles very mission critical operations that grow to rely on tools and services that were originally created by actual tech visionaries that learned and accelerated in the art...

Also, "learning on the fly" should not be a normal practice on mission critical operations... The ideal of under-bidding contracts and under-paying employees, and even hiring tons of junior employees for mission-critical development efforts is really destroying and undermining the entire industry.

Sometimes we need to just turn down the opportunity to work in a burning bowl of spaghetti, the resulting products & services always reflect the process applied to create them, no matter how many "smart" work-arounds are created.