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At the risk of an unproductive comment, that was quite a read (in the most positive sense.) Your advice is very well taken and I can see the logic and experien

At the risk of an unproductive comment, that was quite a read (in the most positive sense.) Your advice is very well taken and I can see the logic and experience in it, I really appreciate the time you took to ramble :) To make the comment more productive and to echo some sort of thoughts on your thoughts: Would agree re: managerial culture. I've seen a very out-of-wack ratio of deadlines set vs. deadlines that provide productive bottom line or user facing value. Secondly re: values, I've come to a realization that I love my coworkers but find that what I love in them seems to get diluted the higher you get in the organization. It puts me in a conflicted spot about fit; and in the interim your survive v win advice is likely wise if only from a hedging-risk point of view. The emphasis on small ship cycles is something I certainly need to improve. I've pushed hard to turn my code/commit style into this manner, so it seems lacking that I would drop that from overall feature delivery. Cross functional teams however, although appreciating wholeheartedly (had a 4 man dream team at my last job that I really miss) I have very little power to change. The PM org is as you suggest _very separate_ (at least from my perceptions of their incentives and alignment). I can't be entirely pessimistic, there is certainly shared value when the shared feature ships well, but for whatever reason the focus seems often much more on asserting control and less on delivering value, for whatever reason. Disaster handling as well is something that where I see the value, although pragmatically, you're usually in "put out the fires, damage control" mode and holding ransoms isn't really looked kindly upon. To their credit, the powers that be have been _reasonable_ (although as a grumpy ex-sysop I always like to push harder) in assigning time to postmortem/address issues, but for incentives beyond even THEIR control, it's not a priority. In short; I've seen some "large company" problems at multiple places I've worked and in the lack of "true power" to oppose it your advice is very valid, if an uphill battle.

wpietri 10y ago
Glad to hear it was helpful. And don't beat yourself up for, e.g., release frequency. This stuff is hard enough to do when the context supports it. I agree with you on some people favoring control over value. That's especially true for people whose primary job function is seen as control. Project managers and middle managers especially are often rewarded for the appearance of action, not the quality of the business result. This is part of why I strongly favor approaches where cross-functional teams mostly self-manage the work and other details normally given to project managers. As to disaster handling, I should be clear that I'm not talking about asking for big changes during a crisis. Instead, there's this window after trauma where people are open to doing something different. Before the pain, nobody has reason to change the status quo. And eventually, they forget. It's sort of like how when people have a really bad hangover, they might say, "I'm not drinking again for a month." In that moment you can say, "Wow, I've been wanting to do that too. Let's try it together." Good luck with your efforts! I wish I had a general-case solution for you. But my approach has been to find or create contexts where I can get a relatively independent team focused on value delivery. I think current managerial culture is inimical to that, so I expect that's an uphill battle at most places.

wpietri 10y ago

Glad to hear it was helpful. And don't beat yourself up for, e.g., release frequency. This stuff is hard enough to do when the context supports it. I agree with you on some people favoring control over value. That's especially true for people whose primary job function is seen as control. Project managers and middle managers especially are often rewarded for the appearance of action, not the quality of the business result. This is part of why I strongly favor approaches where cross-functional teams mostly self-manage the work and other details normally given to project managers. As to disaster handling, I should be clear that I'm not talking about asking for big changes during a crisis. Instead, there's this window after trauma where people are open to doing something different. Before the pain, nobody has reason to change the status quo. And eventually, they forget. It's sort of like how when people have a really bad hangover, they might say, "I'm not drinking again for a month." In that moment you can say, "Wow, I've been wanting to do that too. Let's try it together." Good luck with your efforts! I wish I had a general-case solution for you. But my approach has been to find or create contexts where I can get a relatively independent team focused on value delivery. I think current managerial culture is inimical to that, so I expect that's an uphill battle at most places.