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You're right - most organizations reward managers who ship. Hopefully they're tying the incentive not to the act of shipping, but the outcome of shipping. Reven
by harlanlewis 12y ago
You're right - most organizations reward managers who ship. Hopefully they're tying the incentive not to the act of shipping, but the outcome of shipping. Revenue, users, really fun launch parties, etc.
- aaronbrethorst 12y agoHopefully they're tying the incentive not to the act of shipping, but the outcome of shipping I'd say this is true for someone who has ultimate P&L responsibility (a senior VP, for instance), but it's definitely not the case for someone multiple levels below them. If you're a software developer responsible for a single feature in a huge app with hundreds or thousands of developers, your boss isn't going to gauge your performance with how the app does in the marketplace. They're going to look at the relative "success" of your feature. No shipped feature, no success. cf. Microsoft.
- harlanlewis 12y agoAgreed, but the example is talking about managers. Not every manager is working on features that are going to have an easy-to-measure market outcome, but work that isn't purely strategic should have some identifiable metric of success beyond whether or not it exists.
- aaronbrethorst 12y agoTotally agree. Unfortunately, this requires their manager to have taste, which is probably (and tragically) an impossible requirement.