How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants? (iism.org)

True, but I think we can separate the idea from the person/company.

The problem statement is very well written. The Director of Engineering rotating because they can’t deliver, and the battle between Product and Engineering.

Conclusion is rushed, but it boils down to what agile advocates at the core: product manager and QA need to be in the room along with engineering.

It is until they hear daily about the challenges, first hand, and they see the struggle that it makes sense. Does not matter how many reports the PM does, first have seeing why technical debt is making things slow is invaluable.

Only addition I would add is: there is a reason why sprint waterfalls exist. You can’t iterate forever, and someone needs to play the role of the mature person that knows when something is good enough and needs to be shipped. I think Agile as a framework is at its limits. We need something that lets us run the engineering but at the same time becomes more predictable to business.

Joke's on them, I always come straight to the comments.

That advice is OKish if you only ever want to be a mediocre employee clocking in to get your wages.

I think you need to be far more proactive in training your mind if you want to become a founder [edit: of a successful business], or move into more responsible roles, or even just to get satisfaction from shipping great software.

That is highly subjective. Money is a motivation but some people seeks more from their jobs. I wouldn't work on a job if it is not really giving me a sense of accomplishment either.

People here cannot bear the thought that software development could be, gasp, just a job. But there’s nothing wrong with shoveling the shit and getting paid.

Jobs where this kind of attitude prevails suck to work at. Frustration waits around every corner. And the more pointless projects and dysfunction permeates a company the more chance the other shoe will come crashing down any moment and the company will fall apart and people will lose their jobs.

It's really wild how different people's reasons can be for doing the same thing.

I think a better future world is still possible and needs to be built by passionate people. I'm in software to try to do my small part in getting there.

I probably won't succeed but that's why it's a BHAG. I also don't ever want kids, a spouse, and am perfectly happy riding the bus or a bike so yeah, my annual income needs are usually met somewhere around February and lounging around gets old eventually.

Your system sometimes works better ... I really can't do anything unless I'm passionate about it. I can sit in a chair from 6am-11pm and will get nothing done for weeks if I don't believe in it. It's stupid and I need to get over it.

I kinda wish someone waving some cash in front of my face was enough to get me to do something. That'd be much easier because I could be the one waving it.

This is terrible advice and this type of thinking is a common indicator of an employee who is not motivated. The goal is to not just build but build products customers want.

I don't think it is. In my experience this attitude produces poor work and is a drain on the rest of the team.

That's like your opinion. I write software because it's fun. Getting paid is icing on the cake.

Except when management finally wises up and realizes the product has no future... neither do you.

Much better to look around and find the product/project that is actually going to spawn revenue for the company and get on that team. When layoffs come, you've a much better chance of weathering the storm.*

* No guarantee that management won't do something stupid and lay off the golden egg under some stubborn belief the money sink will someday take off.

I agree with you, but I would add that on most software projects it's possible to find a way to derive satisfaction from the work.

Solving problems and writing elegant code is good, whether it's running the next Amazon or streaming intrusive ads to a Smart Toothbrush or whatever. (I'd draw a line at weapons systems, gambling, automated extortion etc - but YMMV.)

Economic value rarely correlates to more 'human' measures of value - which is depressing but nevertheless useful to me as someone whose skills are societally useless but moderately lucrative. I suspect many of us here are in the same boat.

Customers can be a nightmare simply because they don't want to be closely involved and on their end, they usually are not engineers so the requirements can easily not make sense.

I don't blame people for avoiding such tasks, especially in a Fortune 100. The bigger the company, the more diffuse responsibility and the harder it is to steer the ship anyway.

I worked at a big tech company many years ago and it's precisely this disconnect that I will never work for a big successful company again. Successful companies tend to have a lot of "buffer" in terms of resources so they feel no urgency to ensure that resources and time are allocated to something meaningful. The objectives of middle managers are often not aligned with the companies. I've been on projects that were delivered on time and under budget only to be canned just before shipping because after two years the market has shifted. No one in those two years felt the need to change anything or make the hard decisions. Rather it was easier to just act like everything is fine until the last possible moment after wasting 2 years of worth of engineering resources with 50 engineers. The problem isn't you.

This problem isn’t unique to big tech. It’s much easier to tell each other you are customer driven than to actually pick up the phone.

I’m in b2b SaaS, and the best approach I’ve found to combat this is to get involved in sales meetings. Salespeople look at you funny if you ask to come along, but if you convince them you aren’t weird it usually works. And you tend to make the meeting more successful, as well as getting actual useful insights into what prospects actually want.

The problem is the definition of customer and the actual commitment to a customer focus, in my experience.

It's usually hijacked away from the actual customer - that is to say, a person who pays your company for products and/or services - to various internal "customers" who are nothing of the sort.

Spotify are ostensibly the Gods of Agile, but how many Spotify music customers were actually begging for podcasts? How many of them were begging for Spotify to lock podcasters behind their paywall and stop podcasts working with any tool? Was there even a single paying Spotify customer demanding that?

The bigger the project or smaller the company the more customer involvement is demanded. You may not be in that nexus. If the app runs with new features perhaps that is good enough.

What you're missing is that the 'customer' in this case is not the buyer of the product, but rather a proxy for them found in the PM.

Big, heavy, complex products, the kind one imagines F100 companies build, are not suitable for literal agile where a paying customer as willing and able to iterate with the development team.

With that kind of product, you have many customers. When you have many customers, they always have conflicting requirements. You cannot engage in an agile process with more than (say) three of them for the same product. You'll very quickly reach an impasse and lose all of them as customers, and end up with the same product anyway. And you'll open the kimono, so to speak.

Instead the PM has to decide (based on various activities such as seeing what other companies are doing, where the space is headed, and yes, talking to customers) what the product is to look like, and he (or more likely, you the product owner in this case) has to engage with the dev team. You have to be the customer that actually needs and wants something, and that the dev team has to satisfy. This is why PMs have to have significant industry experience. Often, CEO of a small company slots into PM role in larger companies.

Agile as written, with paying customer in mind, is for consulting style engagements. But that doesn't mean it can't be applied well when PM is a stand-in for the customer. It keeps the dev team moving, and brings the 'C' players up to 'B' level. (Unfortunately it also brings the 'A' players down to 'B'.)

> Because I’m still new to this role, I wonder if I’m being naive or idealistic around how we approach our feature development, or if this is just how most companies operate.

yes and yes. You are being naive, and this is how most companies operate. That your boss can't explain it to you just shows that the company doesn't understand the application of agile and are just cargo culting, like most companies, and doing a very poor job of "Agile" because they don't understand it. Most companies implement agile as a way to micromanage devs, not as a way to get a better product, and even then they suck at it.

> I’ve been told that someone in leadership described me as being too “black and white” in this area, but I consider myself both pragmatic and flexible to alternative ideas.

When I've seen responses like that in the past, it's often somebody who just doesn't want to listen to any complaints, for various reasons. I recommend a quieter approach, where you don't tell anyone what you really think about the problems, but just wait for an opportune moment to ask "can we do X for Y?" in a public forum. That way you can't be ignored, you aren't complaining at all, and somebody else can later take credit for implementing your idea, without them having to admit that they were the cause of the problem to begin with.

Off topic, but would you mind sharing how you made the transition from design to product management? I'm considering making the jump myself and am curious about what the experience has been like.

I dogfood my product. I write what I need.

Works for me. Some folks like what I do, as well.

>Because I’m still new to this role, I wonder if I’m being naive or idealistic around how we approach our feature development, or if this is just how most companies operate.

IMHO, the way to answer this question is from a sales perspective. What's the revenue of the product? Is the product doing well financially and are customers renewing? Are the sales teams able to hit their targets?

I work in a customer facing role for a huge company and you've described the situation here well. We've got a ton of products, some of which are doing really well and one of which is tanking. The one that is tanking is something the company is placing a huge bet on.

Whenever I speak with product management for the product that is failing, they have this grand vision looks amazing in slides, but when I work with customers it's obvious that vision isn't grounded in reality. It's like they spoke with a bunch of CIOs and drew up this vision that has nothing to do with how the market actually is. It's almost painful to talk with product management because they just keep going back to this grand vision and anything that goes in their ears gets filtered by this viewpoint.

And it absolutely shows in the dismal sales and high customer churn.

If the product is doing well, maybe you are naive. If the product is failing or barely treading water, you're not the one being naive.

You work in a fortune 100 company, welcome to bureaucracy.

Those middle managers do not give a shit because they are middle management! Big companies have tons of people like who's only motivation is to simply not get fired (this is one point the movie Office Space nailed by the way.)

A fish rots from the head. If your executive leadership is not obsessed with its customers, nobody else will be. And you guys will continue to be rudderless which is demoralizing.

Big, fat, companies get lazy and that sucks for a guy who wants to make a difference. Go work somewhere that encourages logical (black/white) thinking and values engineers who want to turn customers into raging fans.

Or just work each day enough to not get fired, and build your own product on the side.

I've worked 6 years as a PM, last 4 at FANG

Here's some advice, which you are free to take or to leave, (and that's very reasonable since my advice is generic and I can't speak to your exact circumstances)

1) Just start doing it. Don't wait for someone to give you permission to prioritize customer needs. Pick up the phone and call them. Go to a store and watch them shop for your product. Talk to people. When you set OKRs/KPIs, just make them about customer needs. Be the change you want to see. Especially if you have spiritual buy-in from your manager. But your intentions have to be crystal clear on point about wanting what's best for the customer and the business and doing so in a rational way until you earn some social capital. It cannot be interpretable as political or they'll construe it as that and fire you

2) Use bureaucracy jiu-jitsu. Do what you think needs to be done in order to make the customer and the business successful. When someone tries to make you work on their arbitrary BS, give them a form to fill out and tell them it's in your team's triage queue. Make them force you to deprioritize a project which has clear value and then when that happens, make sure you announce loudly to all stakeholders why that project was depriortized and what's going to be implemented instead. If your stakeholders have even 2 braincells, they'll do the pushing back for you - you don't need to do it alone.

Lastly, you can't change an entire culture by yourself. For some places, it's just too late. But if you can find allies who feel the same way you do, you can be the beginning of a large change for your whole org by just being a good example

You might enjoy reading all the things that Marty Cagan has written about product management. I think he has a good take on what it means to be a good PM, and what you're describing sounds like what he calls a Feature Team [1]. Unfortunately, it's really common to be in an organization like this where the roadmap is driven by outside stakeholders, and product managers are treated like project managers who just implement their ideas.

[1]: https://svpg.com/product-vs-feature-teams/

Isn't the entire point of agile to get rid of the product managers?

I often refer to this diagram when in doubt

https://www.scrumexpert.com/knowledge/how-to-detect-agile-bu...

Agile bullshit starts with the attitude that some of our people are not client facing

Words of wisdom and experience - I am with you on that one

Just pivot to "assisted-AI" where your solution is really bad but it adds "super-powers" to all their existing employees. It may give cover to some other businesses to fire staff under the "force-multiplier" argument that your software adds ("If their software makes every employee 33% better, we can fire 33% of our staff!").

> we all know the project will fail unless someone develops well-perfoming, human-level AGI before Q4/2020

This is hilarious, and makes me wonder how many similar corporate AI initiatives are under way in the world right now.

    - your ceo

Once the CEO asked me to build a human level AGI in front of our only customer (small company).

I asked them what they wanted to do (it was solvable with keyword search) and told the CEO that I’d be happy to get it into the next version. It took an afternoon or so to implement.

Gotta love the PHB effect.

> but at least we can now tell investors we are a keen company with an AI play up our sleeve

Obviously I don't know the details of your company situation, but I've experienced myself over the years, that sometimes it can be less overall cost and trouble to give this kind of lip service, rather than fighting an overwhelming fashionable trend until that trend runs its natural course to extinction.

> Team motivation is in a weird space: everyone is relaxed because there is no pressure to succeed

If I was leading that team, I would try to find (or insert) nuggets of goodness (smaller/non-obvious objectives and tasks) in that project which allow the team members to get some personal longer term benefit out of it.

And ideally find (or insert) nuggets of goodness (smaller/non-obvious objectives and tasks) in that project, which have a good chance of becoming useful to the company later - beyond the scope of the official project.

And hopefully the team would become excited about doing something meaningful beyond the official project objective.

p.s. I'm speaking from experience in this kind of a situation.

Think about open-sourcing some of the stuff you're doing. Otherwise it's likely to stay buried in the corporate IP portfolio

Would it be a better (even marginally) play to use AI to detect if they are passing off the work to underlings?

Ha. CTO at my last place did something similar. He hired an AI/ML team. I asked him what projects he had in mind and he said once the team was on board they'd find things to do. He also said we needed a voice app because he read an article about the size of the market. I quit before seeing how any of that worked out.

what about human augmented ai? that is what successful ai companies use

It could be worse... you could be at a company where using such technology is banned... because marketing and sales are scared of the blowback.

Oh boi does this hit hard as a engineer that recently got hired as a part of the AI/automation team on a startup, that few month in got told by the boss that "we need a AI team because we promised the investors. Investors are not interested in tech without AI baked in". Whelp.

I wish I knew the details of the project; getting to mess around with new technologies for a year and no strict deliverables is a great position to be in. Worst case, you got to learn some new tech and pad your resume for your next job.

Almost seems like menial work that your CEO might be using to gain a better foothold on gathering external investments. My experience with CEO's says that they aren't complete morons. I hope for your sake there is another valuable reason why he has you all doing this work.

Times change, patterns stay the same. I remember when Facebook got big, so obviously everybody had to copy them.

Imagine working on an accounting application when the CEO suddenly instructs everybody to figure out how accountants could connect with each other and maybe publish their balance sheets instead of cat pictures or whatever. Details changed, but it was that weird.

To kind of go against the flow here: _most_ of the projects I worked on seemed to be a waste of time when I worked on them, but ended up making a lot of money many years later, years after I'd moved on. I like the green field stuff, and green field stuff looks like a waste of time most of the time. The first three versions suck ass and don't do much, but without having them you don't get to something that doesn't suck. Both the first and the second project I worked on at MS seemed like horrible waste of time in early aughts, but have likely made tens of billions of dollars for it by now.

Then there are projects where I did something ahead of its time (and was ultimately unsuccessful) yet other people did the exact same thing later and made a ton of money.

Finally I ran engineering at a startup which spent ~3 years largely wasting time and money, only to be acquired for hundreds of millions of dollars for reasons that are still unclear to me.

You never really know. Success is a random, nonlinear process and your effort is but one input to it. I've given up trying to predict if something will be successful if the work that's being done at the front lines is solid from the engineering standpoint. Business is mostly about being very persistent and/or being in the right place at the right time.

For all you know your company might be one PhD hire away from absolutely blowing the doors off competition. Or it may get to that point years later because it started thinking about it now. Or having at least some sort of an AI strategy (even if not very successful) might double the acquisition price in some upcoming merger. All of those things would make your work worthwhile in retrospect even if the project fails. You never know such things.

These uncertain situations are usually a blessing in disguise: because management has no clue, you can pretend that you have clue, and steer things in the direction that's useful to you. Put some cool things on your resume, if nothing else. Move on, see if you have better luck elsewhere.

In my own experience, often non-technical people will attribute things as AI that we wouldn’t, eg any basic automation. Really anything that’s in any way intelligent or seems that way. I had a project where people were excited about a feature that was basically just alerting when one value crossed over or under another... I wonder if your team could provide real value to customers providing some smart “AI” feature that isn’t actually machine learning.

It looks exactly like my company, but I am few months ahead. I am now at the time where investors starts to ask for results. The CEO wants to please them and starts to put pressure on our team by changing priorities almost everyday (which impact the project quality). The thing is, everyone knows that the project is doomed to fail.

IBM?

Many of us have been there. I think what struck me was how low the treshold really is for what's accepted as "AI" in most industries.

Do this:

1. make something that has some "modern" AI such as deep learning in it, but that doesn't do anything much useful (because that's almost impossible in most cases). E.g. predict something trivial based on a time series, and repoort it. We all know how hard this is, so just take some hello world ML project and change some inputs.

2. Find some easy project that actually makes business sense, and that isn't yet done, and can be done with simple logic or some old school "traditional" ML or constraint solving e.g. a scheduling/optimization problem.

3. Make sure these efforts are "merged" so that the fancy AI tech AND the measurable good outcome is the same project. The "AI" moonshot of the company.

4. You can now say you are doing "AI", you have measurable success.

yeah I've resisted these fake ai project as much as possible, but sometimes the budget is there so you're better off spending it.

bet there's something between a full AGI and a set of ifs on the audit log that could help the human experts reduce error rates and fit within the direction constraints

Any chance at sharing what consulting company put the AI play idea in your CEO's head?

I used to work at a software house which makes software for few big companies. A few years ago our CEO thought it's time to diversify our income stream by creating some SaaS. He came up with a really then-buzzword-packed(AI, ML, IoT, microservices, Kubernetes, mobile first) product. Quite ambitious, especially for a team of 5 people, regular web devs who had no working experience with any of those. Everyone voiced their concerns but we were told to just use our best efforts.

Long story short: after a year or so, our boss decided to scrap our half-baked system and gave up on the idea of creating some internal product entirely.

I'm cynical about a lot of 'trends' that have popped up over the year, because oftentimes they're just compromises or marketing to get employees to join them. Notably, in recent years, a LOT of employers / recruiters will stuff "IoT" or "Blockchain" into their job descriptions, knowing full well they do nothing with it - or if they do, it's a couple hours a week they give up on to keep the employees happy, interested and motivated. It's a weird theater.

Most of those jobs are generic Java work, but it's hard to find motivated / qualified people to work on just that.

I've had a very similar experience. I'm surprised at how little so many managers and investors understand AI.

They talk about it like it's some sort of panacea that will make a company automatically grow 10x. Then you ask them what they actually want you to build and... Crickets.

Perhaps the most significant outcome is that you guys will be peppering your resume with AI buzzwords, which the board may be paying through expensive staff retention.

> Interesting times, but at least we can now tell investors we are a keen company with an AI play up our sleeve!

To be fair, this is absolutely not unique to you but literally every (software) company in america right now.

Ahh, I see. You misunderstand your true customer. It is not the purchaser. It is the investor — PE. Or, "the market".

I worked on a project that basically was a very simple rules engine, encoding a bunch of domain knowledge in a digestible dashboard format, which happened to use a few predictive models' output as well to drive a few of the rules. The product owner insisted that "AI" be in the name, whereas I was reluctant to put lipstick on that pig. Ultimately (as usually happens if the product owner is your boss) the "AI something something" name stuck, but the whole branding of the endeavor rubbed me the wrong way (even though the product was actually somewhat useful).

That much involvement is going to lead to customer driven architecture, which seems like another failure mode.

Some projects need constant involvement.

Some need months of work to have anything of any use.

Amazing book. The funny thing is I never expected to see it applied to software engineering - but in this context it's very appropriate.

What stack are you using? I did the same thing not long ago with Flask and Plotly.

Why don't you build gateway to th standard tools?

It truly is fascinating, the world of tools and ecosystems built up to sidestep inane security rules in organizations.

Spoken from experience, this includes things like Anaconda in orgs where devs can’t use just any Python packages, or scripts from the internet copied and pasted into files because the firewall blocks git cloning. One could even consider AWS as a platform for devs to get around InfoSec red tape and have some semblance of control. The goal as a dev here is to fight the fewest fights to make tools available, by getting access to the biggest “bundles” of tooling they can.

In such organizations, there is either no concept of cost/benefit of overly restrictive firewall rules, etc, or the culture is such that the security team has become entrenched and unquestionable.

You forgot docker.

At my company due dates are used purely as motivators. Every date promised to upper management is absurdly aggressive. I'm told this is meant to instill a "sense of urgency" to motivate people. It makes new hires burn themselves out. The few who survive the pressure eventually realize it's all a show and just get used to apologizing for all their "failures."

What area? I've mostly quit software because of how much I hate working on complete garbage and also don't have the schooling/engineering skills to work on truly cool stuff. Pivoted to wood working.

That might look good in the short term, but there are many companies and roles which require you to show the actual number of users, or the load of the service that you worked on. Also many technically challenging issues only come out under load, and actually working on challenging things are very different from reading about them. Just my 2 cents.

    there are many companies and roles which require you 
    to show the actual number of users, or the load of the
    service that you worked on.

This feels so true! I had a similar experience.. spent 3 years working for big US companies, completely focused on whatever trend would impress investors the most with no one giving any thought to what might actually be _useful_ for people who, you know, actually give us money.

Now I work for a small company doing very niche work and I don't think I could love my work more. I mean people do use our software, but there's no VC funding so no pretense of needing to hop on the latest bandwagon. It's just so much better.