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by frankgrecojr
1405 days ago
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I love this soapbox! I'm trying to figure out why a well-intentioned company starts this way, and then quickly digresses. I think part of the issue is the feedback loop doesn't exist. If your end to end cycle is done, the sales team can tell the customer that feature x will be done on date y (we can say they should never gives dates but I think this is impractical). Then, let's say priorities change, and the agile cycle determines that we should focus on other items. I think product and sales fail to "bubble this up" and then a toxic culture starts to brew where product and sales despise engineering and middle management can't be trusted to "fight for their engineers". |
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It takes work to continuously bring everyone together to disagree-and-commit over priorities. It's one of the major components of leadership and influence in organizations these days. Ideally, managers are continuously broadcasting information and regularly pulling each other into meetings to have healthy debates.
(An old mentor taught me that timelines are the lowest-common-denominator of communication. When people stop getting useful information and get frustrated, they resort to pushing on timelines, since that's the one common language everyone in the org can speak without needing any other strategic context.)
I think another major contributor is that so many people have never worked at a healthy, well-functioning technology organization. Then, as people bounce around, they bring their habits (and coping skills) with them. Endless hordes of certified scrum-masters team up with non-technical stakeholders to turn engineering teams into coding teams -- and the cycle continues on.