Issue no. 006 - Why do we continue to force engineering teams to make short-term bets when often long-term goals are more strategically important and better?
Absolutely salient point. However, reality and my experience has shown that more emphasis is placed on short-term thinking for this exact reason you say - promise of afterlife. Keeping an eye on long-term is necessary for long-term prosperity but sometimes, short-term opportunities become available that must be taken. Continuing to go after short-term hits in hopes of finding that one solid win is like stumbling around the woods looking for Bigfoot.
Every time we’ve ever tried to rush a shipment, we’ve paid it 2-3x later in debt which comes to roost within a year. I’ve wasted so much time in trying to move fast that I now know from experience that the trade off is by default a bad one.
Thank you 🙏🏼. It takes guts to stand up to momentum and say no new features until we pay our debt. I saw this short term calculus play out at Blackberry, Apple, and Google. One of the reasons why Snow Leopard remains my most favourite OS X release - 0 new features. Now that was long term thinking. https://512pixels.net/2015/04/the-snow-leopard-moment/
There is a time and a place for short term and long term thinking. If it is all long term, then it's like the promise of an afterlife.
Absolutely salient point. However, reality and my experience has shown that more emphasis is placed on short-term thinking for this exact reason you say - promise of afterlife. Keeping an eye on long-term is necessary for long-term prosperity but sometimes, short-term opportunities become available that must be taken. Continuing to go after short-term hits in hopes of finding that one solid win is like stumbling around the woods looking for Bigfoot.
Your best edition yet!
Every time we’ve ever tried to rush a shipment, we’ve paid it 2-3x later in debt which comes to roost within a year. I’ve wasted so much time in trying to move fast that I now know from experience that the trade off is by default a bad one.
Thank you 🙏🏼. It takes guts to stand up to momentum and say no new features until we pay our debt. I saw this short term calculus play out at Blackberry, Apple, and Google. One of the reasons why Snow Leopard remains my most favourite OS X release - 0 new features. Now that was long term thinking. https://512pixels.net/2015/04/the-snow-leopard-moment/