I still need those features and a date. Thank you, Sales & Marketing.
The Accountability Problem
11–20 of 62 posts
Re: The Accountability Problem
#12This seems to assume that any endeavor in software is something entirely established from scratch. There are no patterns, experiences or reusable parts that can be relied on. A hack at it until it works methodology. Accordingly, it seems to imply that we as developers can’t be accountable for anything but effort. It’s a sad condemnation of our industry, and at odds with any (normal) commercial undertaking that has li…
I am not sure this comment it is in any way related to the article it is commentating on. To name one example the comment complains about the absence of PV calculations while the article actually specifically describes this.
Re: The Accountability Problem
#13Complete side note: I’m on public wifi right now and the domain used to host the images in this article is, for some reason, blocked. But as the author (or whatever tool was used to generate the article) has taken time to write decent `alt` text, I can still get a good idea of what is going on. Kudos.
Re: The Accountability Problem
#14Let's say we got someone to be accountable for something. And that something has failed horribly. Now what? Infact, the first problem would be to identify whether something is a success or failure. This is tough, as anything can be dressed up as success, attributing any negatives to the external factors. Any determination (success or not) would mostly go by perceptions people have on other people, but not really by w…
> Assuming it was somehow classified as a failure, the next bigger issue to identify whom to blame. Accountability is to gain introspection about the past and intermediate states of an (interpersonal) system to figure out what decisions were made by whom, when, how, and in which context, so that they be analyzed and similar failures or whole failure mores can be avoided in the future. It isn't the ability to properly…
>> You make them accountable so that they have the ability to produce an account of what, how, and why happened at a given time.
The very first line in the Wikipeda article on Accountability states that "accountability is equated with answerability, culpability, liability".
Are you saying a person who is accountable may not be held responsible for the outcomes?
Re: The Accountability Problem
#15ChatGPT 说：
I really liked how this post digs into the accountability gap that exists in so many organizations. It’s not that people don’t care or aren’t trying — it’s that no one feels real ownership for outcomes once responsibilities get spread across layers of management. I’ve seen this happen in agile teams too: endless retros, reports, and syncs, but no one truly driving the result. What resonated most is the idea that accountability shouldn’t come from top-down pressure, but from mutual trust and clarity of purpose. When everyone knows why something matters and can see the impact of their work, accountability becomes natural instead of forced.
Re: The Accountability Problem
#16>But, thanks to my CPO and CEO’s support, I can say that we are building software using product bets. We identified a handful to take to the leadership team earlier this year. They estimated the value, then chose a specific set of bets for us to pursue based on our capacity. It’s definitely elevated our conversation around product strategy, and I can see it getting even better as we gain familiarity with the approach…
...by the passing of which the name of the game will be to find another vehicle for occluding reality and creating optics. Something to replace "bets" with "shaping" and "appetite", for example.
Connecting effort and outcome is hard as orgs get bigger, and a lot (a LOT) of those strategies have to do with optics and the "sponsors" being "on the wave" at the moment (trusted by owners/board). While it is not realistic to say "we do the work until it works and costs be damned" some tools for this are required, and I would say putting out a "bet horizon" of a year or a quarter is setting up some nice political battles in the future.
Re: The Accountability Problem
#17On one company I worked on, in one year tech team shipped 53 epics, delivering all the features sales, CS and product needs.
By EOY the company grew zero. Literally zero. This was a series A company.
CTO got in a meeting with the CEO and said: we delivered everything you asked for, but the company didn't grew. What went wrong?
CEO wasn't able to act on this.
In the end the company started by laying off the tech team - which delivered what is was asked for (even sometimes knowing that it was not going to work).
The more I think about it, I get a feeling that if your core product depends on software and your CEO doesn't know how to develop software, then your company is doomed to fail. And because all companies depend on software nowadays, more and more are doomed to fail. There's also this new idea of CFOs running the company. But they don't run the company, they run the books. It's hard to grow a product based on the books.
It's confusing and it looks to me that less and less people have the balls to be accountable for their lack of action.
Re: The Accountability Problem
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Assuming it was somehow classified as a failure, the next bigger issue to identify whom to blame. Accountability is to gain introspection about the past and intermediate states of an (interpersonal) system to figure out what decisions were made by whom, when, how, and in which context, so that they be analyzed and similar failures or whole failure mores can be avoided in the future. It isn't the ability to properly…
>> You make them accountable so that they have the ability to produce an account of what, how, and why happened at a given time. The very first line in the Wikipeda article on Accountability states that "accountability is equated with answerability, culpability, liability". Are you saying a person who is accountable may not be held responsible for the outcomes?
The person you are replying to describes something akin to retrospective but even in Agile we still have people who need to be accountable and that includes the engineers too.
Re: The Accountability Problem
#19On one company I worked on, in one year tech team shipped 53 epics, delivering all the features sales, CS and product needs. By EOY the company grew zero. Literally zero. This was a series A company. CTO got in a meeting with the CEO and said: we delivered everything you asked for, but the company didn't grew. What went wrong? CEO wasn't able to act on this. In the end the company started by laying off the tech team…
Why does the CEO knowing how to develop software matter? This sounds more like the company was unable to sell the software, either because of product/market fit or some other reason
Re: The Accountability Problem
#20On one company I worked on, in one year tech team shipped 53 epics, delivering all the features sales, CS and product needs. By EOY the company grew zero. Literally zero. This was a series A company. CTO got in a meeting with the CEO and said: we delivered everything you asked for, but the company didn't grew. What went wrong? CEO wasn't able to act on this. In the end the company started by laying off the tech team…
It does seem that something went wrong in your story, but I don’t think it’s the CEO not knowing how to develop software. Maybe I misunderstand what you mean by that phrase.