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I wonder if we have conditioned clients to expect everything now. Are we harming our own customers by allowing them to make demands that in turn only harm thems

I wonder if we have conditioned clients to expect everything now. Are we harming our own customers by allowing them to make demands that in turn only harm themselves in the long run? Do we have too much of a revolving door for an organization to see this trend?

rayiner 4y ago
Yes. If you need more time ask for it and explain why it’s necessary and why the delay couldn’t have been anticipated. It’s better to be late than be late and also delivery a shoddy product.
- HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
  Sounds a lot like the discussion I had with my 12 year-old about his Science term paper :-)
  - rayiner 4y ago
    Being transparent and communicating roadblocks early is just a good way to get through life. Nobody likes to hear something will take longer than expected, but what people really hate is non-communication that leads to unexpected delay, or even worse, poor work that's delivered late.
throwawaysleep 4y ago
Pretty much. I have never seen a product manager/project manager see a multi year project through to the end. I also suspect a lot of it comes down to it not being the problem of anyone until the end of the project. Sales can promise whatever they want. Tech can put it off for a while.
origin_path 4y ago
"Are we harming our own customers by allowing them to make demands that in turn only harm themselves in the long run?" It sounds paternalistic but yeah, that can happen. I've been in this sort of office politics situation where that was an issue. The problem in that case was that the projects were quite long and touched many different people inside the customer companies, many of whom had differing agendas. In particular the customers were banks and their security people had a habit of demanding very specific changes that would clearly sink the entire project a couple of years down the line, and even contradict the original justifications for it. Unfortunately the company I worked for at the time had a lot of difficulty with this concept. The upper management tended to abstract the political complexity inside these banks as "the customer wants X so why aren't we giving them X" where in reality there was no "the customer", just lots of people inside big orgs who weren't really talking to each other. The notion that "the customer" could be incoherent and we needed to manage that somehow just wasn't there at all, they just saw it as anti-social arguing. So it was in fact career limiting for me to point out these issues.

rayiner 4y ago

Yes. If you need more time ask for it and explain why it’s necessary and why the delay couldn’t have been anticipated. It’s better to be late than be late and also delivery a shoddy product.

HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
Sounds a lot like the discussion I had with my 12 year-old about his Science term paper :-)
- rayiner 4y ago
  Being transparent and communicating roadblocks early is just a good way to get through life. Nobody likes to hear something will take longer than expected, but what people really hate is non-communication that leads to unexpected delay, or even worse, poor work that's delivered late.

throwawaysleep 4y ago

Pretty much. I have never seen a product manager/project manager see a multi year project through to the end. I also suspect a lot of it comes down to it not being the problem of anyone until the end of the project. Sales can promise whatever they want. Tech can put it off for a while.

origin_path 4y ago

"Are we harming our own customers by allowing them to make demands that in turn only harm themselves in the long run?" It sounds paternalistic but yeah, that can happen. I've been in this sort of office politics situation where that was an issue. The problem in that case was that the projects were quite long and touched many different people inside the customer companies, many of whom had differing agendas. In particular the customers were banks and their security people had a habit of demanding very specific changes that would clearly sink the entire project a couple of years down the line, and even contradict the original justifications for it. Unfortunately the company I worked for at the time had a lot of difficulty with this concept. The upper management tended to abstract the political complexity inside these banks as "the customer wants X so why aren't we giving them X" where in reality there was no "the customer", just lots of people inside big orgs who weren't really talking to each other. The notion that "the customer" could be incoherent and we needed to manage that somehow just wasn't there at all, they just saw it as anti-social arguing. So it was in fact career limiting for me to point out these issues.