It’s hard to argue that any one approach to, well, anything in software is better or worse than any others, because very few people are collecting any data and even fewer are reporting what they’re trying. Worst is understanding how requirements are understood, prioritised, and implemented. Companies can be very opaque when it comes to deciding what they do and when they do it, even if you’re on the inside.
This can be frustrating: if you can see what you think is the path between here and all the money, then it can be enervating to find the rest of the organisation is following a different path. Doubly so if you can’t see, and aren’t shown, any reason to follow that path.
What we do know is that the same things that work in small companies don’t tend to work in large ones: search for any company name X in the phrase “why doesn’t X listen to customer feedback” and you’ll find multiple complaints. Customers get proxied, or aggregated, or weighed against potential customers. We feel like they aren’t listening to us, and it’s because they aren’t. Not to us as individuals anyway. If a hundred thousand of us are experiencing kernel panics or two million of us have stopped engaging with feed ads, something will get done about it.
That said, there are some things I’ve seen at every scale that need to be in balance for an organisation to be pointing in the right direction. Three properties of how they work out what they’re doing, that need to be in synergy or at least balanced against one another. I now ask about these three things when I meet with a new (to me) company, and use these as a sense check for how I think the engagement is going to work out.
Leadership Vision
One third is that the company has some internal driving force telling it which way to go and what challenges to try to solve. Without this, it will make do with quick wins and whatever looks easy, potentially even straying a long way from its original mission as it takes the cheapest step in whatever direction looks profitable. That can lead to dissatisfied employees, who joined the company to change the world and find they aren’t working on what was promised.
On the other hand, too much focus on the vision can lead to not taking material reality into account. A company that goes bust because “our product was ten years ahead of its time, the customers weren’t ready” is deluding itself: it went bust because the thing they wanted to sell was not something enough other people wanted to buy.
Market Feedback
One third is that the company has some external input telling it what customers are trying to do, what problems people have, what people are willing to pay for those problems to go away, and what competitors are doing to address those problems. Without this, the company will make things that people don’t want to buy, lose out on sales opportunities where they don’t describe what people have in a way that makes them want it, or will find themselves outcompeted and losing to alternative vendors.
On the other hand, too much focus on market feedback can lead to a permanently unsatisfying death march. Sales folks will be sure that they can close the next big deal if only they had this one other feature, and always be one other feature from closing that deal. Customers can always find something to be unhappy about if sufficiently prodded, so there will always be more to do.
Technical Reality
The third third is that the company has some internal feedback mechanism telling it what is feasible with the assets it already has, what the costs and risks (including opportunity costs) are of going in any direction, and what work it needs to do now to enable things that are planned in the future. Without this, forward progress collapses under the weight of what is erroneously called technical debt. Nothing can be done, because doing anything takes far too long.
On the other hand, too much focus on technical desiderata can lead to the permanent rewrite. Technical folks always have a great idea for how to clean things up, and even if all of their suggestions are good ones there comes a time when a lumberjack has to accept that the next action is not to replace their axe sharpeners but is to cut down a tree. Features are delayed until the Next Great Replatforming is complete, which never comes because the Subsequent Replatforming After That One gets greenly.
The Trifecta
I don’t think it’s particularly MBA material to say that “a company should have a clear leadership vision moderated by marketing reality and internal capability”. But in software I see the three out of kilter often enough that I think it’s worth writing the need down in the hope that some people read it.
