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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?

#231

Post by lifeisstillgood »

willvarfar wrote: post #166
petters wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you all knew about optimizations 10x a data scientist salary, but didn't act on them? Actually good that the company hired him then.

> So you all knew about optimizations 10x a data scientist salary, but didn't act on them? Sadly, most engineers aren't allowed to pursue that kind of stuff. Normal dev jobs can be stifling.

If you walk into your CEOs office today and say "I can increase revenue from our site by 1 million dollars" (#) you will get a hearing. If three devs on that site do it, with a poc they will get the chance to do it 95% of the time.

But the CEO who hires a data scientist is explicitly asking that person to walk into their office and say "I can increase revenue by X" - that is their job. The website dev does not have that job.

And there are two views on this problem - the CEO did the right thing by hiring someone to explicitly optimise the site - there are improvements to be made, create the right organisation so that those improvements flow to company.

Or there is the other argument, that the organisation is stifling innovation from below, and that the CEO should have been actively soliciting improvements from dev team and elsewhere

Generally both are right

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

#232

Post by aloisdg »

alkonaut wrote: post #211
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.…

Many of us have been there. I think what struck me was how low the treshold really is for what's accepted as "AI" in most industries. Do this: 1. make something that has some "modern" AI such as deep learning in it, but that doesn't do anything much useful (because that's almost impossible in most cases). E.g. predict something trivial based on a time series, and repoort it. We all know how hard this is, so just take…

A "friend" of mine is doing exactly that in its disruptive startup. Their AI part is a joke and handle a part that nobody really care about, but hey they are doing it like every other cool kids.

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

#233

Post by LoSboccacc »

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.…

yeah I've resisted these fake ai project as much as possible, but sometimes the budget is there so you're better off spending it.

bet there's something between a full AGI and a set of ifs on the audit log that could help the human experts reduce error rates and fit within the direction constraints

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

#234

Post by tappio »

Nice write up of the problem, but the solution is not that simple. Not saying that you shouldn't try, but the problem of doing something that customers want is extremely difficult and has a lot to do with luck. We have implemented many features no one wants, and many features that the users wanted and use. It's impossible to know the outcome beforehand. We have always discussed with the customers before hand, but that does not mean the feature is going to be used. Even when customers are paying for something it does not mean they really use it. So "Don't just build Something™, build an industry leading product that customers want and love" is nice and catchy, but the reality is never going to be that easy. And how do you even know if you just did it the wrong way? If a small change would have changed everything? You can't really trust people either because they don't know what they want. You can't trust analytics because you don't know if you are measuring right things? When do you know that no one wants a particular feature?

Putting yourself to a pedestal because you've figured out a problem won't help for sure. Be humble and accept that figuring out the right thing is hard work. Most often people are doing their best, working in silos or else where. Most product managers are not there to make your life terrible, even though you might think that way from the article.

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

#236

Post by noizejoy »

ashtonkem wrote: post #148
buu700 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not only the UI, but all of the business logic - so a very thick client indeed.

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

#237

Post by roel_v »

rags2riches wrote: post #161
rurp wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Years ago I worked at a store with registers that didn't calculate change; myself and the other cashiers would need to calculate the change mentally. Once in a while I would get people like this who threw out convoluted amounts of change. Normally it was fine, but sometimes towards the end of a long day when my brain was tired I wanted to strangle them. The store actually had really great employees overall and I susp…

You don't calculate change. You just count it out, picking up coins and bills as you go. Start at the sum to pay and count towards the amount the customer gave you. Work your way up from the least significant digit using the smallest denominations. No hard mental calculations are involved, you just need to know how to count. Basic cashier knowledge they should be teaching you on day one.

"Basic cashier knowledge they should be teaching you on day one."

About 10ish years ago I had an idea for a product that would essentially provide online training on this for cashiers. Back then I thought 'but everything is moving to cashless payments, plus more and more registers calculate change, no need for this". I wonder sometimes if this was The One That Got Away for me...

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

#238

Post by rheotron »

kevsim wrote: post #214

This article makes me feel very fortunate to work the way we do in my company. We have tight feedback loops with our users, we plan work together as a team (not just a PM dictating things), we're not forced to give finger-in-the-air estimates (we work on stuff until it's good enough to ship and then ship it) and we follow up with analytics and user interviews to figure out if we achieved the outcome we were after. We…

Can you say more about how you plan work as a team? Interested to hear how you keep this fast and productive and avoid getting caught in the weeds of other's opinions.

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

#239

Post by bigiain »

dkersten wrote: post #188
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.…

In my own experience, often non-technical people will attribute things as AI that we wouldn’t, eg any basic automation. Really anything that’s in any way intelligent or seems that way. I had a project where people were excited about a feature that was basically just alerting when one value crossed over or under another... I wonder if your team could provide real value to customers providing some smart “AI” feature th…

I had a boss not so long ago who kept selling our customers our "Conversational AI Bot". What we gave them was a fairly dumb keyword search of a library of questions the customer would type in along with answers - wrapped in some html widgets displaying cartoon robot heads.

It still astounds me that not only did none of those customers sue us for blatant misrepresentation, but most of them were delighted with what they'd bought.

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

#240

Post by qqj »

at the previous company i worked for, we were developing several products that either no one wanted or were so bad you wouldn't use even if you could for free (i didn't even install the app thing on my phone because of how morally corrupt our mobile team was).

we had bizdev guys running around making deals in third world countries, and pr dept. working overtime just to create the illusion something was moving. r&d dept went through like 3 org restructures within span of 6 months, for no reason other than to satisfy the ego of r&d vp. i mean, i've seen politics that would make machiavelli seem virtuous by comparison.

it was beyond bizarre.

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