Great engineering teams focus on milestones instead of projects • Hacker News Board

Re: Great engineering teams focus on milestones instead of projects

#91

Post by mavelikara » Mon, Dec 27, 2021, 11:43 PM UTC

geertj wrote: post #89

mavelikara wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The domain is complex, and customers try to find solutions just like the PM. But, as a PM you have the benefit of talking to many customers so you see common patterns and can often see the ‘problem behind the problem’. I agree to most of this. The team - by virtue of building and operating the software product catering for many customers - can often understand the customer usecases and solution better than any one…

> But it is the team, as a whole, where this expertise resides. Not one member of the team who happens to have a particular role and title. Which is why I made the distinction between accountable and responsible. I totally agree that it’s the team as a whole that’s responsible for the output of the team, and that it’s essential that everybody on the team has a customer focus. > you seemed to imply that any counterexa…

> Now I am curious, was there anything in the wording of my reply, or in your past experience working with PMs, that caused you to reply?

No, it is not anything you said specifically, Geert. But I have direct and indirect knowledge of PMs who adopt the "All the shipped features were my ideas, the bugs and tech debt were added by engineers" attitude. This thread too gave my that vibe.

I have written more of my opinions on the PM orgs at [1] and [2]. Happy to chat more, if you are interested - my email is on my profile.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28965764

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27391220

Re: Great engineering teams focus on milestones instead of projects

#92

Post by mbrodersen » Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 1:20 AM UTC

nyc111 wrote: post #63

It seems NASA understands the value of milestones https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2021/12/24/key-milestones-after-...

It takes NASA 1 year to make a minor UI change and 1 day for SpaceX. According to astronauts who have worked for both organisations. So I am not sure that NASA is a good role model for how to run things.

Re: Great engineering teams focus on milestones instead of projects

#93

Post by ablekh » Wed, Dec 29, 2021, 1:19 AM UTC

jadeforrest wrote: post #78

ablekh wrote: post #17

The core argument in the post makes no sense to me at all. Projects and milestones are orthogonal concepts.

Can you explain more? I don't see it that way, but it might be we're defining things differently. Milestones are defined in a specific way within the article, and in that way they don't seem orthogonal to me.

Well, firstly, milestones is a standard term and even in this article the author points to the expected definition (reference to Wikipedia article). His "special version of milestones" does not imply another definition, but rather just some specific attributes / requirements / expectations for milestones to be used. Secondly, the author presents project and milestones as a dichotomy ("Most engineering organizations focus on delivering projects. They should focus on milestones instead." - emphasis mine), whereas, in fact, you cannot define milestones outside of the context of a project. Thus, it is not an either/or situation, but rather one where both concepts simply exist. One more note: while both concepts are orthogonal, they are not fully independent; meaning that milestones must belong to a project and a project can have milestones.