@shanley

Deciding What to Build

Deceit and trickery

Three-headed reptile/beast/humany thing

Demons whipped by demons whipping humans

Lake of boiling pitch

Various diseases

Fraud

ROADMAPS

Anything with both a timeline and features.

The answer can’t be “I don’t know.”

But that’s the only answer that isn’t a lie.

Erosion of trust between engineering and the rest of the business

Death march to meet release dates

Marketing dependency on product releases

Premature decision making

Huge waste of everyone’s times

Inconstancy

Inconstancy: A Sphere of Heaven

Get rid of roadmaps

Explain their consequences to everyone

Make a document called “what we are working are” and give everyone edit access

Change the document when things change

Each person is responsible for the expectations they set

Two teams

They fight each other

Endlessly

While carrying heavy weights

Unresponsive

Greed

You and your team aren’t going to accomplish what you think you are

You will do more things poorly

You will complete less things

You will do easy things instead of important things

The Wise

Take what you think you can do

Divide by 4

Take the time you think you’ll do it in

Times by 2

Make a list of what is important

Make a list of what you’re doing

Compare

Start with the important stuff

You will never do the things that aren’t important

Gigantic worm

Vast vile slush produced by ceaseless foul

Icy rain on top of everything

Sightless and heedless of neighbors

Gluttony

We have so many tools!

Look we even built our own tool!

We have to use lots of tools because nothing is perfect for us

We have to use lots of tools because subtle feature differences profoundly affect the way we work

We have to keep switching tools until we find something that works

The Contemplatives

The tools aren’t the problem

You are

Get rid of all your tools

BUT WHAT ABOUT OUR BUG TRACKING SYSTEM IMPLEMENTED ACROSS 3 DIFFERENT TOOLS

Let the fear take you

Delete it all

Not that bad, actually

Green fields

There’s even a castle

“Inactive” sins

Can’t attain better world

Limbo

The state of being somewhere OK but you can’t get anywhere better

Technical debt

Justice

Let’s get really real about culture

I literally don’t care what kind of furniture you have

Culture is about what is more important than other things

Culture picks between alternate good things

Culture picks bad things

Technical debt is a cultural problem

Features

Technical Debt

THE STUFF UNDERNEATH THE API

Expose internal ghettos

Spread the pain around

Acknowledge technical debt

Swamp-like river Styx

Wrathful fight each other

Sullen lie beneath the water

There’s also a marsh

Anger

People have opinions

Not every opinion makes it

Resentment and distrust

Loss of faith in the product

Earthly Love

Create a culture where it’s safe to talk about the product

Not everything counts as a feature request

Answer “why”

Talk more about tradeoffs

Feedback loop

Team exercises

Extend trust to people in your company who aren’t engineers or developers

For each hell, a matching heaven.

Be honest with each other