Just throwing things to the wall and see what sticks is not agility, nor is it just mindlessly running after any random car like a dog chasing the mail man.
Who said anything about "mindless"? Just because work wasn't planned in detail in advance does not make it mindless—the people actually doing the work make creative, nuanced decisions as they're working. Not pushing a top-down, up-front plan gives people more room for careful nuanced thought.
That isn't "throwing things to the wall" or "mindlessly running around", that's trusting a team of professionals to make effective creative decisions.
Who said anything about detailed planning? You’re throwing this in and then using it as a lever to push an engineering led approach. There is no such argument in this thread.
There is however the argument of whether companies should look ahead for more than three months. And brilliant and trustable professionals don’t change my assessment that they should.
I agree, if you have team of experienced professionals tgat is. If not, well, stuff to the wall it is. If wrapped in sometjing something agile, at least it looks good.
Trying to guess the future of complex systems is an exercise in hubris.
Success is far more likely if you decide on a goal, and then build feedback loops that let you learn. And in the internet age a feedback loop of a month is painfully slow, never mind three.
Is that goal for next week? Two weeks? My argument was that three months is too little for any sort of company strategy. We’re talking about a financial quarter. You don’t even have the time to measure your decisions.
I'm pretty skeptical of this kind of thing even for enterprise software. I can imagine scenarios where it's relevant - if you're planning to release Disney+ in 6 months, yeah, you'd better coordinate pretty tightly to make sure you're not missing some key dependency when you flip the switch. But I've seen multiple incredibly successful enterprise products developed through the "throwing things to the wall and see what sticks" approach.
