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0 pointstheptip4d ago0 comments

> They are waiting on the next well-formed spec

Is this actually true? Maybe in a widget factory. I think it’s an anti-pattern for the new world.

When you look at places that are shipping at insane pace (like Anthropic) the secret is not accelerating the writing down of a roadmap and we’ll groomed backlog, it’s empowering smart individuals to run their own end-to-end product improvement loops.

You can slightly reframe the OP by saying “the bottleneck is product ideas”, but “well formed backlog items” IMO frames it as more structured and hierarchical than it should be.

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apsurd4d ago

The problem with this is that everybody thinks they have better ideas than they do. And engineers are probably the worst offenders in that they're smart enough to make a case that deludes themselves.

The insane billion dollar companies ship straight to production because they have PMF so anything and everything gets signal.

The same happened with Facebook and Google. And it was always cautionary advice to mimic these giants. It's a bad idea for all the rest of us.

theptipOP3d ago

Well, if you actually build the feedback loop then you solve this by weeding out the bad ideas.

This is like going to a startup as a senior bigtech engineer - if you can’t ship it becomes clear quite quickly.

Regarding the talent dysmorphia issue - the best way I know of getting people to step up is to give them more agency and more accountability. The new world will require that IMO.

I think Google etc are more a story of how much you can get away with when you have a strong monopoly. Their orgs are not shipping fast, nor good at shipping products. (Google in particular is incredible at infra but laughably bad at consumer products.)

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