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I 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 f

I 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 ago
On 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 ago
  True. 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 ago
    As 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 ago
      I 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.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
fleitz 13y ago
It's easy for product and marketing to convince engineers by demonstrating results. Usually they come up with some stupid idea, engineers waste time building it, and then it fails. But instead of letting it die, they add yet more sub-features to their stupid fucking feature no one wants.
- bdehaaff 13y ago
  This is a sure sign of a broken PM group (and product dev team in general). Great teams are made of equal parts PM, Eng, Design and a group of folks who can actually position and sell a product.
  - fleitz 13y ago
    For sure, which is the fundamental reason why kanban doesn't work. If you have good teams basically all you need is a thin layer of process that prevents total chaos, kanban is a good fit for that, but most teams implement kanban in a cargo cult manner. I've worked on sales driven teams where I fundamentally trusted the sales guy because when he said if you make feature X I can sell it for $Y dollars and we made bank doing that. Conversely I've worked on teams where everyone was trying to avoid being fired and would only make decisions that were defensible, eg. company X is doing Y so lets do Y, resulting in the usual follow the leader failure.
    - bdehaaff 13y ago
      Yes. I think they are related to the "scrumdamentalists" who I have written about in the past as well. See -- The Holy Scrum War - http://blog.aha.io/index.php/the-holy-scrum-war/ http://blog.aha.io/index.php/the-holy-scrum-war/

bhattisatish 13y ago

On 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 ago
True. 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 ago
  As 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 ago
    I 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.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

fleitz 13y ago

It's easy for product and marketing to convince engineers by demonstrating results. Usually they come up with some stupid idea, engineers waste time building it, and then it fails. But instead of letting it die, they add yet more sub-features to their stupid fucking feature no one wants.

bdehaaff 13y ago
This is a sure sign of a broken PM group (and product dev team in general). Great teams are made of equal parts PM, Eng, Design and a group of folks who can actually position and sell a product.
- fleitz 13y ago
  For sure, which is the fundamental reason why kanban doesn't work. If you have good teams basically all you need is a thin layer of process that prevents total chaos, kanban is a good fit for that, but most teams implement kanban in a cargo cult manner. I've worked on sales driven teams where I fundamentally trusted the sales guy because when he said if you make feature X I can sell it for $Y dollars and we made bank doing that. Conversely I've worked on teams where everyone was trying to avoid being fired and would only make decisions that were defensible, eg. company X is doing Y so lets do Y, resulting in the usual follow the leader failure.
  - bdehaaff 13y ago
    Yes. I think they are related to the "scrumdamentalists" who I have written about in the past as well. See -- The Holy Scrum War - http://blog.aha.io/index.php/the-holy-scrum-war/ http://blog.aha.io/index.php/the-holy-scrum-war/