[breakfastduck]

I could give almost limitless examples where we've been forced to drop everything and jump on implementing a hacky version of a new feature because sales convinced the CTO we were going to lose a major client if we didn't implement it asap.

They were usually never used, or used by an incredibly small percentage of users.

The platform ended up a complete mess because of the number of hacky features implemented and was a nightmare to maintain.

I'm sure we ended up losing more business due to the instability of the platform than we gained from adding these.

It's incredibly frustrating for the engineering teams who continually warned of the risks of rushing these things in without any analysis of usage.

[syshum]

>>or used by an incredibly small percentage of users.

Sometimes it is not the number of users that need the feature but just 1 or 2 very important users... The ones that have the final say over Yes we use this, or no we do not

[breakfastduck]

Yeah that can certainly be true - unfortunately we often found that the very important users to us didn’t see us as important as we saw them, meaning we’d implement these hacky features on their request on short timescales only for them to then refuse to integrate for weeks - we could have done the feature properly had we not been pressured into getting it over the line so soon.

[syshum]

Ahh yes the old "Hurry up and wait"... been there too many times....