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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?

#41

Post by m463 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #37
m463 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's hilarious - I can't help but think of this dilbert cartoon on making change: https://dilbert.com/strip/1993-03-20 (I am not putting you down)

I would have thought of this one: https://dilbert.com/strip/1998-03-17 My dad always disliked the strip you cite, because the change Dilbert expects is $5.25, but there's no way to provide $7.14 in a way that couldn't be trivially reduced to $2.14. If the goal is to make things easy for the cashier, he should obviously provide $2.14 and just keep the $5 he already has anyway.

You are right, that is a much much better cartoon as a reply! If it had been in my faulty memory banks...

(and I agreee - the first dilbert cartoon is super contrived)

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

#42

Post by [deleted] »

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.…

[deleted]

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

#43

Post by derjames »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #35
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 dogfood my product. I write what I need. Works for me. Some folks like what I do, as well.

This is exactly my approach. Years ago I wrote a set of tools to help me in my day to day operations. In this way I was able to work very fast. I added more and more features. Then at some point I decided to distribute the tools to the rest of the team. Now, nobody can live without them ... (about 30 individuals)

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

#45

Post by throwawaywrench »

robocat wrote: post #30
nurettin wrote: post #4

> Don't just build Something™, build an industry leading product that customers want and love! The point of writing software is to get paid. If the process leads to something actually useful, good on you. If not, you still got paid. It was just a drill, life continues.

That advice is OKish if you only ever want to be a mediocre employee clocking in to get your wages. I think you need to be far more proactive in training your mind if you want to become a founder [edit: of a successful business], or move into more responsible roles, or even just to get satisfaction from shipping great software.

>if you want to become a founder

Why do you need to work up to being a founder? Any bozo can start something new especially given that the vast majority of start ups either never go anywhere or flame out somewhere in the first year or two. Even I've "become a founder" a couple of times.

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

#46

Post by ciceryadam »

rodgerd wrote: post #19
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…

The problem is the definition of customer and the actual commitment to a customer focus, in my experience. It's usually hijacked away from the actual customer - that is to say, a person who pays your company for products and/or services - to various internal "customers" who are nothing of the sort. Spotify are ostensibly the Gods of Agile, but how many Spotify music customers were actually begging for podcasts? How m…

It wasn't the customers, it was the beancounters. Spotify itself doesn't have any "original programming" as the video players have, so the logical move is to capture a market worth something for a lot of listeners. This wasn't about doing something for the listeners, it was about capturing and milking a market.

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

#47

Post by apohn »

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 role for a huge company and you've described the situation here well. We've got a ton of products, some of which are doing really well and one of which is tanking. The one that is tanking is something the company is placing a huge bet on.

Whenever I speak with product management for the product that is failing, they have this grand vision looks amazing in slides, but when I work with customers it's obvious that vision isn't grounded in reality. It's like they spoke with a bunch of CIOs and drew up this vision that has nothing to do with how the market actually is. It's almost painful to talk with product management because they just keep going back to this grand vision and anything that goes in their ears gets filtered by this viewpoint.

And it absolutely shows in the dismal sales and high customer churn.

If the product is doing well, maybe you are naive. If the product is failing or barely treading water, you're not the one being naive.

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

#48

Post by shultays »

nurettin wrote: post #4

> Don't just build Something™, build an industry leading product that customers want and love! The point of writing software is to get paid. If the process leads to something actually useful, good on you. If not, you still got paid. It was just a drill, life continues.

That is highly subjective. Money is a motivation but some people seeks more from their jobs. I wouldn't work on a job if it is not really giving me a sense of accomplishment either.

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

#49

Post by hedora »

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.…

Once the CEO asked me to build a human level AGI in front of our only customer (small company).

I asked them what they wanted to do (it was solvable with keyword search) and told the CEO that I’d be happy to get it into the next version. It took an afternoon or so to implement.

Gotta love the PHB effect.

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