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by lumost 18 days ago
When I was in a large org, it was a common failure that a manager would come in from a smaller firm - and assume that our design practices etc. were meaningless overhead.

Inevitably they'd try to do a "rapid prototype" of a feature that had been tried a hundred times before and declared "too hard/unworkable/uninteresting." as they wouldn't talk to those who had done this before, or look at any past work... the invariable result was a project shut down within 6 months and the manager would be shown the door some time later.

The main takeaway from the above is to listen to people around you when you join an org, and observe the habits of successful leaders. Odds are good that at least within this particular org under these circumstances... those habits are the ones that work.

1 comments

So I'm on the other side of this usually.

Most places I land there's deference to the status quo and those that came before. People assume that efforts of that past were well considered and that good work was done.

But ultimately when pressed, there's generally no evidence of the above, and when there is evidence, one can generally demonstrate the flaws in the approach, so I press on anyway and it hasn't really bitten me yet.

Of course, in many of these projects there's now deference to decisions I've made. Some of those decisions were well made, with evidence and supporting work, to make them challengeable should the understanding changes. Some of them are gut checks because they didn't matter to me at the time.

Either way the take away is good, but often practices exist simply to frustrate.