> ...then encourage, praise, and promote people who actually ship features. If only it were that simple. I've been inside clients where this happened. It gener

> ...then encourage, praise, and promote people who actually ship features. If only it were that simple. I've been inside clients where this happened. It generally wasn't pretty. You want an avalanche of trivial features? This is how you get an avalanche of trivial features. Meanwhile, the end user population is restless with non-trivial features sitting in backlogs for quarters and years on end... Then some bright bulb decides to let end users vote which features get worked upon. And the largest cohort of users dominate the agenda driving away the multitude of 1-3% cohorts that happen to make up the majority of the market for the product with their Microsoft Office-like lists of not-quite-alike feature lists, but are the bread and butter of most mature codebases serving large diverse end user populations. Sales people love large diverse end user populations. They make sales so much easier. There is no substitute for judicious leadership. The map is not the territory. You need a balance that you will always struggle to adjust; all metrics or all gut feel both lead to poor outcomes.