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I think there are two answers here. The first is treating software develolment as a process - and using some form of statistical process control to “manage” th

I think there are two answers here. The first is treating software develolment as a process - and using some form of statistical process control to “manage” the process - reduce waste etc. this is it turns out exactly what Agile / Scrum was / is all about. Remember those “retrospectives” we are supposed to do - that’s the point at which we whip out a diagram and see if we are trending out of band. It’s fine. It works really and it does help reduce waste - which for any sane world reduced waste is a proxy for productivity. But no matter what that is only “doing things right”. It is not “doing the right thing”. At this point we can also say we have tactical and operational parts under control (or at least monitored). The “doing the right thing” (or strategy) is next and this means something most business refuse to accept - that their grand strategy, their Vision, might be total bollocks. Searching for productivity in software teams is the new version of blaming lazy workers in the factory floor - we are all software ompanies now, and if you are not succeeding you can either blame your crappy product market fit, your strategy or you can whip the employees harder. Guess which is easier. So if you and the CEO need to make fucking appointments to have a honest chat about strategy something has gone terribly wrong with your companies ability to quickly respond strategically - if you have a problem, it’s not the employees that need to run faster. edit: yeah I started ranting there, sorry. The whole “takes ages to get face to face time” is a red flag, but you can get around it. As for the rest, I really respect the attempt to treat the whole company as a system - not just the software team - the product bet idea clearly sets out goals and places emphasis on whole org. That’s really great but as you say “executives prefer if other people are held accountable”. But if they can learn a company can be programmable (then they might learn to start programming)

robertlagrant 2y ago
> this means something most business refuse to accept - that their grand strategy, their Vision, might be total bollocks Actually this is often talked about, but only internally to the senior team. You generally don't want to be saying "actually widgets might be a bad idea" which might horribly demoralise your widget factory workers, when you might well conclude after discussion and analysis that actually they're still a good idea.

robertlagrant 2y ago

> this means something most business refuse to accept - that their grand strategy, their Vision, might be total bollocks Actually this is often talked about, but only internally to the senior team. You generally don't want to be saying "actually widgets might be a bad idea" which might horribly demoralise your widget factory workers, when you might well conclude after discussion and analysis that actually they're still a good idea.