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by 0xbadcafebee 1759 days ago
You'll never see a purely Agile or Lean product from an Enterprise, because those don't have a clearly defined set of expenses, profits, and timelines.

One terrible thing about Enterprises is the way their finance team leads product decisions. In order to maximize their profit, they announce a product will be ready by X date, and estimate the cost leading up to it. If you don't hit those numbers, it affects a lot of other numbers, especially if you're publicly traded. And that's before the wild promises Sales makes. They are preternaturally addicted to arbitrary deliverables.

Essentially, their products are projects, and the customers are incidental to the whole thing. There is no estimate for customer happiness in the business case for a new product team. If you build it on time and under budget, everything else (getting a customer to use it and like it) is taken for granted.

1 comments

Would you mind telling me at what kind of Enterprise you had that experience with finance?

I led a product finance team at a SaaS company (ServiceNow, Atlassian, Okta, etc. tier) and all of our models and analyses are product driven including a/b testing and surveys with customers.

Largely Enterprises that had too much profit to care, or were controlled by a parent org with a tight leash on expense with no regard to product. Old-school businesses that had barely begun digital transformation. As long as they got their 2% growth YOY, there was no interest in closely tracking anything but the core BI metrics for growth and expense.

I would add that a/b and surveys are not good enough to identify customer pain and solve the problems they most want solved. There's a raft of feedback mechanisms that most Enterprises ignore because their products are so complicated that nobody wants to sit with the users and find new methods for continuous improvement. Agile/Lean/DevOps/SRE constantly emphasize quality and immediate halting of product work until bugs are fixed, yet no Enterprise I have ever heard of does this (even for reliability - one of the core metrics of any online product!)