(2023-08-23) Cutler Tbm237 Incompetence

John Cutler: TBM 237: Incompetence! I was reflecting on this research I did earlier in my career. As an experiment, two teams tracked where their time went for two weeks...really taking into account the nuances (timesheet)

I keep coming back to this over the years with new ideas. Here's the latest.

On first blush—especially for people with no product-building experience or narrow product-building experience—this looks like absolute madness.

You don't become Team 1 all at once. It can take years, dozens of rotating team members, and hundreds of perfectly pragmatic decisions that end up having unintended effects down the road. mediocrity

It gets more interesting. What if you've been on Team 1 that transitioned to Team 2 (assuming Product Team 2 is effective)?

Like you fired the people who made it that way?" And the answer is frequently:
Not really. A manager left because it burned them out, and we did get a new manager. They got a shot at advocating for us. But it was a steady shift as we got some air-cover and clarified our strategy. It was the right timing, as well, because more broadly, as a company, there was a shift as we realized this was unsustainable.