The value creators (engineering/programming/creative/design/product) people have been pushed aside for the value extractors (finance/managers/marketing/oversight) and now the extractors are creating the product. It is a completely backwards setup that is causing products to suffer.
Nothing worse than knowing what a product needs and being overridden by project managers with no experience shipping product or fighting to put in quality or features the users want. Somehow the MBAs and PMs are now seen as product value creators when they are part of the value extraction team, it doesn't and won't work.
Most developers know now that adding to a product or putting in time to get to a more polished post-production model rather than pre-production only can cost you perception due to taking longer, it is a major problem with our industry today.
Imagine the executives of the movie company telling what directors, technical and creative people should and make. Or a novel written by the publisher. It isn't what anyone wants. The value creation needs to go to the value creators AND they need freedom to control their tasks and flows. What happens is people that are capable of shipping products people want, end up in a tasked system where they are given daily/weekly tasks from people that have never shipped. It is frustrating and destroys value.
This is an age old problem highlighted in "How Software Companies Die" but really you could say how creative companies die. Software and technology is closer to art than business in many cases. You can't force creativity into a 3 hour task planned by an outside project manager that doesn't understand what it takes to ship a product themselves. There are some great project managers that do, but they end up just making things or their own company because it is such a unique subset of the overall pool.
> Watching non-programmers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn’t know how to surf trying to surf.
> “It’s ok! I have great advisors standing on the shore telling me what to do!” they say, and then fall off the board, again and again. The standard cry of the MBA who believes that management is a generic function. Is Ballmer going to be another John Sculley, who nearly drove Apple into extinction because the board of directors thought that selling Pepsi was good preparation for running a computer company? The cult of the MBA likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don’t understand.
Nothing worse than knowing what a product needs and being overridden by project managers with no experience shipping product or fighting to put in quality or features the users want. Somehow the MBAs and PMs are now seen as product value creators when they are part of the value extraction team, it doesn't and won't work.
Most developers know now that adding to a product or putting in time to get to a more polished post-production model rather than pre-production only can cost you perception due to taking longer, it is a major problem with our industry today.
Imagine the executives of the movie company telling what directors, technical and creative people should and make. Or a novel written by the publisher. It isn't what anyone wants. The value creation needs to go to the value creators AND they need freedom to control their tasks and flows. What happens is people that are capable of shipping products people want, end up in a tasked system where they are given daily/weekly tasks from people that have never shipped. It is frustrating and destroys value.
This is an age old problem highlighted in "How Software Companies Die" but really you could say how creative companies die. Software and technology is closer to art than business in many cases. You can't force creativity into a 3 hour task planned by an outside project manager that doesn't understand what it takes to ship a product themselves. There are some great project managers that do, but they end up just making things or their own company because it is such a unique subset of the overall pool.