Someone tell my boss this, they don’t understand agile. They think we can “start the process” of developing a solution before we’ve understood a single thing about what the customer needs.
And it’s not that we don’t have 100% of the requirements either. It’s basically a we don’t talk to the customer or perform market research to know where we should take the product, so I’m going to make up features at an absurdly abstract level and no you don’t need to meet to talk about it, just start working. “The requirements will come later”, they say. From whom exactly? 🤔
“We shall make solutions to problems people don’t even know they have!”
“What people?”
“All people! Including us!”
THIS
Exactly. We’re not inventing an iPhone or anything. Extremely niche software that is losing market space every month while the PM’s sit around and prioritize the wrong things, there’s no strategy.
I feel this pain. My last assignment we went through all the process of grooming and story pointing, but the documentation was voluminous and we were all expected to be 100% conversant in each story. Then a story would take hours to groom and the testers weren’t exactly sure how to test it, so the developers would have to basically write the end-to-end test cases along with detailed explanations of what could and couldn’t be tested (arbitrary xml format, so some things you had to change independently to test, while other things would never be changed independently in prod so they weren’t valid to test. Also, sometimes the correct thing to do would be determined by the database schema (is nullable?) which would lead to vastly different behaviors.
And lastly, we had to commit to delivering these features on time and to let everyone know ASAP if a timeline was under threat. Well, sometimes I’d tell them the timeline was under threat before the sprint was even started. That pissed them off something fierce because then it made us look incompetent to the customer - well… if the truth hurts, fix something in leadership. Also we were expected to do “whatever it takes” to deliver stories on time. Whatever it takes means skipping the grooming stories and reading the documentation for the next feature because I have to get this feature out the door.
I’ve never worked in the game development industry, but stories like this are what has kept me out of it. “Crunch time” that lasted months? Fuck that. I’m fifty years old with 25 years experience. I have kids at home. I work my ass off for about 9 hours a day and every once in a while a little more, but I’m not about that fucking lifestyle over shitty business software to make a shitty business more shitty money.
So needless to say I’m between jobs at the moment… I’m so over terrible leadership.
okay, I’ve finished your software, it meets your zero requirements!
“Add support for another vendor”
“Okay I understood what you wanted perfectly without any context, I’ve also compiled, pushed, and upgraded your customers”
Some people think it will really be that easy. Maybe 50 years from now, but not with these generative models lmao.
I’ll do you one better. The hardest part of making crap people like is the damn people. I have been a product manager for a decade and I can confidently say if I deliver exactly what the customer asks for I would be an utter failure. Requirements and software that fulfill what a customer says they want will ultimately lead to them asking for something they previously didn’t realize because it actually turns out they have no idea what they want, have an agenda, or the conditions have shifted from under you and what they said no longer holds water.
I could go on a tirade about this but my two cents is you gotta listen to what everyone says, but assume they are a human at the end of the day. It’s too damn easy for me to suck up dev time with what people want. Hell, just one word can keep a dev team busy for a long time. Internationalization! Boo!
I also need to build an environment where the dev team doesn’t despise the business due to a history of constantly shifting goalposts, borderline abusive metrics, and expectations that just create a battered development team. For some reason hiring a PM aligns with an org hitting the point where the original dev team has lost critical members because of terrible burnout and a culture of blaming people and not process. Takes a lot of therapeutic communication to remedy that.
TLDR; People. People are the reason all things are difficult.
