3 ms·
Like 'fad diets' most of the reasons that kanban fails is because the organization was sick to begin with and kanban would have helped if not for the structure
by fleitz 13y ago
Like 'fad diets' most of the reasons that kanban fails is because the organization was sick to begin with and kanban would have helped if not for the structure of the organization in the first place.
Fad diets mostly fail because people go back to eating the same shitty way they did before, just as when a team adopts kanban marketing and product go back to the same stupid way of doing things they did before.
The sad part is that in the vast majority of organization engineering actually knows more about the product than product or marketing.
The core of it is that most engineers don't want to work on the stupid fucking ideas that product and marketing come up with instead preferring to make the product 'good' instead of creating feature parity with some competitor.
If product and marketing were actually good at their jobs they should at least be able to convince the engineers in their own fucking company that what they are thinking is a good idea. Right now I'm picturing the eye-rolls at Porsche when product and marketing announced the idea for the Panamara.
http://blogs.cars.com/kickingtires/2012/09/of-course-we-need-a-porsche-station-wagon.html http://blogs.cars.com/kickingtires/2012/09/of-course-we-need...
- seivan 13y ago"The sad part is that in the vast majority of organization engineering actually knows more about the product than product or marketing." This so much.
- bdehaaff 13y agoThey might know more about the product but in a functioning org if they know more about the customers or market -- something is terribly wrong (unless it is software for engineers). Agree?
- bhattisatish 13y agoI don't really agree with this view point that engineering should know less then PM. In a good team, Engineering knows what features are there, why are they there and what sales / customers are hankering for, and also how they where implemented. Sales is generally aware of what is more valuable to a given customer Marketing has an overall idea of how the market is behaving. PM is the crucible where all these information comes in and they need to define how product will be built. But please note, each subteam should have a strong idea of the market. If not, then people are not effectively communicating. Lack of communication is a sure sign of dysfunctional team, which results in each teams working on their pet projects, but no one knows when what will come out of the whole process.
- bdehaaff 13y agoI think that we would actually agree. I don't really care how Eng gets to a major milestone and delivers a good portion of the required features. The issue is that when the teams lose focus of the bigger picture and stop thinking about key dates and what collection of features are needed to win. When any dev methodology becomes the goal and not the means to an end -- companies and their customers suffer.
- bdehaaff 13y agoI agree with your thoughts around dysfunction as it relates to fad diets and poor habits. I also think that many engineers think they know best, but in a well functioning org PM actually knows the customers and market and has a collaborative relationship with engineering. Do you think that PM has no role or that in most cases they just don't do it well?
- bhattisatish 13y agoOn the contrary in the Kanban process, PM is the pivotal role. They control the que, the cadence of feature releases, etc ... Without an effective PM, the whole thing will fall as a pack of cards.
- bdehaaff 13y agoTrue. But PM needs to pick its head up and think more broadly. A "one in one out" queue is contrary to delivering winning product.
- bhattisatish 13y agoAs I have said below (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6119175 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6119175) You need to delink engineering releases from marketing releases. Where is it written that when the engineering releases a feature you need to make a marketing push? When you have a collection of features ready which as a whole makes sense for marketing, then you make a marketing release with all the related PR, hype cycle, etc ...
- bdehaaff 13y agoI think that we would actually agree. I don't really care how Eng gets to a major milestone and delivers a good portion of the required features. The issue is that when the teams lose focus of the bigger picture and stop thinking about key dates and what collection of features are needed to win. When any dev methodology becomes the goal and not the means to an end -- companies and their customers suffer.
- _pmf_ 13y ago> Right now I'm picturing the eye-rolls at Porsche when product and marketing announced the idea for the Panamara. The sad thing is that the Panamera (in stark contrast to any rational thought and sense of aesthetics) is not a complete commercial failure. People with too much money are weird.
- chris_wot 13y agoFad diets don't work because they are ineffective, not because people go off them. Frankly, if you always followed fad diets, you'd end up killing yourself. Your logic is flawed.