> Solve the problems that people know they have, not the problems you think they have. That's what this boils down to. Being told you have a problem and then f

> Solve the problems that people know they have, not the problems you think they have. That's what this boils down to. Being told you have a problem and then force-fed a solution down your throat never feels nice. Another thing I've noticed, at least at the few places I've worked at is, the bottleneck for the company is practically never engineering productivity. Engineers exist to amplify the efforts of other people, nobody ever sells the output of the engineering department directly. Even when they are directly selling software to the public, there's a release cycle and backwards compatibility to care about before the number of features in each release becomes important. There is also a lot more to a software product than the code going into it. Savvy, politically-aware engineers notice this and carefully structure the pace they're working at. They could easily plow through dozens of tickets or stories if it's called for, it's just that nobody ever expects them to work that hard. Smart management gives the engineers political cover so they're not kicked around like beach balls between upper management PHBs with too much time on their hands.