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I work for Pivotal. Product managers vary in how they work with a team, so this approach is new to me. As an anchor (approximately a tech lead) I made it my bu
by jacques_chester 7y ago
I work for Pivotal. Product managers vary in how they work with a team, so this approach is new to me.
As an anchor (approximately a tech lead) I made it my business to work closely with PMs on the product: giving feedback on how the technical direction was shaping up, asking for stories to be updated or broken apart, giving options for technical seams and so on. Frequently we embed product designers as well, so discussing design options and asking for modifications was common.
But when I was pairing with another engineer we did whatever was on the top of the backlog according to our best judgement and with attention to quality. If it needed refactoring, we refactored. If we felt that would be better to wait, it would wait.
The most important discussion, I found, was about chores -- work that engineers view as paying dividends in future velocity. Our view is that engineering is the ultimate owner of chores and can schedule them according to its considered discretion. The system works because of trust. I trust that product managers and product designers will be diligent in identifying user values and priorities. They can trust us to do what needs to be done to make the software to a sustainable high quality.
I remember once I was rotated in as anchor for a product that had begun to struggle a bit. In particular we had a particular giant tech debt: we had fallen behind on React versions. Worse, there were three parts of the codebase using React, in three different ways. With my peers I decided that we were going to fix it. "I think it will take one pair week", I remember saying.
It took five weeks. But nobody ever said: stop, you work for me, my way or the highway. We talked about the reasons. This tech debt would only grow as time passed. There was no good time to repay it, so sooner was better than later.
We were trusted to do the right thing, so we did the right thing.
- whycombagator 7y ago> In particular we had a particular giant tech debt: we had fallen behind on React versions. Worse, I don't want to read any further. Surely it doesn't get worse than that! /s
- jacques_chester 7y agoIt's a dependency for our main visual library, PivotalUI, which is meant to give a uniform brand across all our products. When you get a flagship site falling behind the products that customers have installed, it looks dumb. But more to the point: it slowed development. I could deal with a bit of visual glitchiness, but my job as an engineer is to create software to solve problems. Piling hacks on top of hacks doesn't do that and it's shitty to the next engineer who joins the team.
- godelski 7y agoYou should probably have your management team look at these comments. How much hated it is getting. I can say from experience that I have quit because of a manager like this. Don't do this. You will lose any engineer that can get another job and be left with those that can't jump ship. I'll let you determine the quality of those engineers.
- jacques_chester 7y agoIf it's not already blazing on a dozen slack channels I'd be surprised, we are a tech company after all. As I noted in another comment, I would give feedback to a PM that this kind of checkin isn't necessary and try to understand how to help foster trust. At Pivotal I have worked with 9 or 10 product managers, none of whom have asked during the day how things were going. If anything I would be the one interrupting them.