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How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

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Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#141

Post by fogetti »

gretch wrote: post #107
mathewsanders wrote: post #5

“Agile teams that truly iterate with the customer can often avoid these problems because the customer is there the whole way through and the team continuously pivots to close gaps discovered by the customer throughout the project, thereby building something the customer actually needs and wants.” I‘m 2 years into my first role as a product owner (made the switch from design) and working at a fortune 100. The thing th…

I've worked 6 years as a PM, last 4 at FANG Here's some advice, which you are free to take or to leave, (and that's very reasonable since my advice is generic and I can't speak to your exact circumstances) 1) Just start doing it. Don't wait for someone to give you permission to prioritize customer needs. Pick up the phone and call them. Go to a store and watch them shop for your product. Talk to people. When you set…

I'd be cautious about this advice. Many times even though the company in general might be a feature factory [0], there might very well be a human who actually meets customers, or at least tried meeting them and failed for some reason.

So a much better and safer idea might be first to figure if there were any attempts in the past, or is there any ongoing similar initiative right now, find the participants if there was any and then to proceed.

By the way if all the PMs at FAANG are like you, that might be a terrible place to work at.

[0] https://cutle.fish/blog/12-signs-youre-working-in-a-feature-...

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#142

Post by Exmoor »

the_af wrote: post #105
vxNsr wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solve self driving? How bout market prediction and just play the market forever. Why would you risk failure when you can just do nothing and make trillions?

Well, to be honest self driving sounds more useful to mankind ;)

If someone offered me AI that drove me to work while I slept or watched movies, or AI that filled out my expense reports, I'd ask if the AI is able to scan the receipts by itself.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#143

Post by fogetti »

rb808 wrote: post #77

The problem is that software no-one wants often has the best careers. I worked on a system used by many people and it was hard work, was getting 10-15 years old, held together with tape and lots of users who all had their gripes and requests. I moved to a system hardly used by anyone and life is so much better. Get to play with interesting technology and no one minds because there is now risk of annoying a our users…

That might look good in the short term, but there are many companies and roles which require you to show the actual number of users, or the load of the service that you worked on. Also many technically challenging issues only come out under load, and actually working on challenging things are very different from reading about them. Just my 2 cents.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#144

Post by m0zg »

worriedformyjob wrote: post #13

Obviously using a throwaway here. Our board members got it into their heads that successful companies must have an AI "play", so they instructed the CEO to invest about 10% of our development budget on AI. We are doing absolutely inane projects that have no hope of succeeding. We serve a niche industry where certified professionals have to do certain tasks personally, instead of being able to delegate to secretaries.…

To kind of go against the flow here: _most_ of the projects I worked on seemed to be a waste of time when I worked on them, but ended up making a lot of money many years later, years after I'd moved on. I like the green field stuff, and green field stuff looks like a waste of time most of the time. The first three versions suck ass and don't do much, but without having them you don't get to something that doesn't suck. Both the first and the second project I worked on at MS seemed like horrible waste of time in early aughts, but have likely made tens of billions of dollars for it by now.

Then there are projects where I did something ahead of its time (and was ultimately unsuccessful) yet other people did the exact same thing later and made a ton of money.

Finally I ran engineering at a startup which spent ~3 years largely wasting time and money, only to be acquired for hundreds of millions of dollars for reasons that are still unclear to me.

You never really know. Success is a random, nonlinear process and your effort is but one input to it. I've given up trying to predict if something will be successful if the work that's being done at the front lines is solid from the engineering standpoint. Business is mostly about being very persistent and/or being in the right place at the right time.

For all you know your company might be one PhD hire away from absolutely blowing the doors off competition. Or it may get to that point years later because it started thinking about it now. Or having at least some sort of an AI strategy (even if not very successful) might double the acquisition price in some upcoming merger. All of those things would make your work worthwhile in retrospect even if the project fails. You never know such things.

These uncertain situations are usually a blessing in disguise: because management has no clue, you can pretend that you have clue, and steer things in the direction that's useful to you. Put some cool things on your resume, if nothing else. Move on, see if you have better luck elsewhere.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#145

Post by coredog64 »

tootie wrote: post #82
worriedformyjob wrote: post #13

Obviously using a throwaway here. Our board members got it into their heads that successful companies must have an AI "play", so they instructed the CEO to invest about 10% of our development budget on AI. We are doing absolutely inane projects that have no hope of succeeding. We serve a niche industry where certified professionals have to do certain tasks personally, instead of being able to delegate to secretaries.…

Ha. CTO at my last place did something similar. He hired an AI/ML team. I asked him what projects he had in mind and he said once the team was on board they'd find things to do. He also said we needed a voice app because he read an article about the size of the market. I quit before seeing how any of that worked out.

Previous employer did something similar. Hired a crazy expensive data scientist, spent truckloads of money on a data swamp, er, lake, and then didn’t really have any goals for what to do with all that capacity.

The new hire got lucky, as there was some low hanging fruit (optimizations we all knew about). The obvious solution was implemented and then he ex post facto claimed 100% credit for the revenue enhancement. Since it’s like 10x his salary every year he’s pretty much on autopilot.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#146

Post by buu700 »

noizejoy wrote: post #87
hieunc229 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it sounds so weird but intriguing. Do you mind telling the rest of the story?

The story would probably make little sense to most HN readers, since it's very old and what was very non-obvious back then, became very obvious 5 years later. Around 1994/95 client/server was unassailable in board rooms (much like AI is now). And after initially speaking up against it, I ended up shutting up about my criticism of that architectural approach, since it would have just gotten me fired. So I ended up sne…

This may be a stupid question, but what does "client/server" mean in this context?

I would interpret it to mean any networked or Internet-based application that has both client- and server-side logic, which obviously isn't anything special in 2020, but it sounds like you're referring to something else that would now be considered outdated?

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#147

Post by kstenerud »

apohn wrote: post #47
mathewsanders wrote: post #5

“Agile teams that truly iterate with the customer can often avoid these problems because the customer is there the whole way through and the team continuously pivots to close gaps discovered by the customer throughout the project, thereby building something the customer actually needs and wants.” I‘m 2 years into my first role as a product owner (made the switch from design) and working at a fortune 100. The thing th…

>Because I’m still new to this role, I wonder if I’m being naive or idealistic around how we approach our feature development, or if this is just how most companies operate. IMHO, the way to answer this question is from a sales perspective. What's the revenue of the product? Is the product doing well financially and are customers renewing? Are the sales teams able to hit their targets? I work in a customer facing rol…

It's important to keep the customer in mind when you're looking at sales figures. It's too easy to be lulled by solid sales and low churn into not actually seeing the customers at all anymore. That's usually the beginning of a downward slide ending in massive churn once a competitor releases what your customers actually wanted from you. This advice is easy to keep as an individual, hard to keep as an organization (unfortunately).

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#148

Post by ashtonkem »

buu700 wrote: post #146
noizejoy wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The story would probably make little sense to most HN readers, since it's very old and what was very non-obvious back then, became very obvious 5 years later. Around 1994/95 client/server was unassailable in board rooms (much like AI is now). And after initially speaking up against it, I ended up shutting up about my criticism of that architectural approach, since it would have just gotten me fired. So I ended up sne…

This may be a stupid question, but what does "client/server" mean in this context? I would interpret it to mean any networked or Internet-based application that has both client- and server-side logic, which obviously isn't anything special in 2020, but it sounds like you're referring to something else that would now be considered outdated?

I think they mean a dedicated thick client using the OS’s UI framework, rather than a web browser.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#149

Post by ashtonkem »

reading-at-work wrote: post #36
worriedformyjob wrote: post #13

Obviously using a throwaway here. Our board members got it into their heads that successful companies must have an AI "play", so they instructed the CEO to invest about 10% of our development budget on AI. We are doing absolutely inane projects that have no hope of succeeding. We serve a niche industry where certified professionals have to do certain tasks personally, instead of being able to delegate to secretaries.…

> we all know the project will fail unless someone develops well-perfoming, human-level AGI before Q4/2020 This is hilarious, and makes me wonder how many similar corporate AI initiatives are under way in the world right now.

I find that a C suite member talking about AI without a specific goal in mind (“we will use AI to automate X, which will help us do Y better”) is a huge red flag.
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