Products are like creative works, they should be built with depth, deep dives and aim to be a fun experience and friend of the user.

Bottom up processes can create great products with polish and love, they are value creation processes.

Top down processes and deadlines create shallow features and products, they are value extraction processes.

Games for instance especially should focus on the fun and gameplay mechanic. Arbitrary timelines, milestones and push can kill both of those very important things.

This doesn't apply to just games though, products should be fun, bring joy and be almost a friend/companion of the user.

All that is lost when you move to today's finance/marketing/business led value extraction style over the creative/design/development approach of value creation.

Agile was supposed to give more time to the value creators, but instead it became a micromanagement tool of the value extractors and the depth has been made shallow. When you slow the "velocity" to add in some love/fun, you are now the problem not the solution, which is completely backwards.

The best value creation process is just an iterative/incremental cycle, with lots of power in the court of the value creators over the value extractors.

I'm on a project that started with a deadline before we really even knew what we were building (months away from that deadline and we still don't). Despite seemly unlimited budget to throw at it, technical debt is out of control and we're already moving slow.

I get pulled into 8 hour meetings every other week where 30+ people try to "plan" our way into building faster.

There are countless challenges with this project, but the forced timeline is by far the worst of it.

> I get pulled into 8 hour meetings every other week where 30+ people try to "plan" our way into building faster.

Somehow we've thus far managed to keep our "as few meetings as possible" culture. Our original founder (whose since been let go, if that's any indication) hated meetings and had rules that were basically:

    1. No meetings that could be an email
    2. No one has to be in a meeting who doesn't want to be there
    3. No PowerPoints

Other departments have bi-weekly day long planning meetings. We have hour long "goals for the quarter" meetings, quarterly. Once in a while a retro when PMs from higher up force them on us.

Retros can be great though, to be fair. If approached as a way to adapt ways of working - e.g ”we’ve had to many pointless meetings that could have been asynchronous slack messages.”

> I get pulled into 8 hour meetings every other week where 30+ people try to "plan" our way into building faster.

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

I’m experiencing that right now. It’s crazy fast, too.

A few key people left, the team is somewhat overwhelmed. And now we have to ship no matter what.

Quality is dropping already.