Then perhaps you had less-than-great managers, and I could think of a variety of reasons for that.
Maybe it was as simple as you claim: no consideration was made to introducing an undercooked user experience. But if a software development manager is green lighting that, likely causing more work for customer service and perhaps sales, I would hope there’s more to the story than that.
Maybe this manager didn’t communicate why releasing a bad experience by a specific date was, perhaps, mandatory to fulfill a contractual obligation. Or maybe you were not able to sort that out from the limited amount of information they gave you.
Maybe they didn’t see the bad UX as truly as bad as you, and perhaps your team, thought it was. Maybe where you thought the feature’s UX passed the 80/20 rule was different than many customers.
I’ve had (product and project, not as often people) managers who have pushed to hold on delivering a half-baked implementation. And I’ve been a manager who has done that. Those better managers exist
Did you ever get feedback or do something to reevaluate why the bad experience was shipped?
The experiences you describe do sound like clueless folks making calls, but know that there are folks in management positions not just wildly flailing about.
There's a couple of things going on here:
- Personal ambition. Usually this is about money, especially the higher up the org you are, but it might also be about becoming a better at tech, or keeping a stable job to pay your mortgage.
- Incentives. How the company rewards things it wants. This might be shares, commission, salary, or bonuses. But it's also about how the company measures and manages those things.
- Ethics. What you're willing to do to achieve your goals. Both individually, and at an org level.
Of course, some people do, but when faced with a company that allows people to focus on short sighted personal ambition, they'll either fall in-line or move along.
And/or that the personal work experience they themselves have had, would be representative for people in general.
(Not saying that the posters above necessarily did now)
> couple of things going on here ... few people are actually interested in helping orgs make mone ...
Yes, nicely written :-)
Maybe in many cases they are "right" not to care, if the company doesn't contribute meaningfully to society anyway
Meanwhile, I have no idea if battery life impact is worth measuring in your use-case. My assumption would be "no" because I would imagine the battery life impact would vary too widely to yield useful data and I don't see what I could do with that information anyway other than recommend some people not use the app. But I'm not really thinking deeply about it now, so I'd love to be enlightened. Meanwhile, trying to get more customers is a good thing, even if it fails.
It's not exactly common for an organization to actively attempt to mitigate the negative aspects of middle management so it's almost an apples to oranges comparison. But since we're on the topic of Google, maybe making management reduction one of an organization's goals is the correct strategy to reduce the bloat and increase the productivity of ICs.
IMHO this is really the point. Somebody has to hire devs, run the evaluation/promotion stuff, facilitate communication to/from upper management, and so on.
I've just never been to a place that couldn't do that with 1/2 to 1/3 of the EMs they have. For whatever reason the standard is one EM per team. A better ratio is on EM per 2-4 teams.
And that illustrates what releasing half-baked stuff and not caring much about tech debt is all about - visibility. This seems to be true across industries. Not releasing something, even if it's not ready gives impression of not doing enough, not delivering, always being late, etc. Releasing stuff shows you (the manager) are the person who delivers. If it's crap, you'll get even more resources to throw at fixing stuff that's already delivered. And you're the hero again (even if it's "techies" who did 80-hour weeks to make it happen).
This doesn't even break down too much in physical product world. "Deliver" could mean sales, first to the market, we'll add copy&paste in 3.0, and so on...
Presumably, in your case, you're talking about an engineering manager. But you haven't mentioned if there's an engineering manager and no accompanying trained product manager. Engineering managers aren't formally trained in doing the hard work of talking to the customers to figure out what the market actually wants, so if leadership at your organization did not build it out to include this role, you would end up being in a tough spot.
Based on you saying that your manager made the decision to build a random integration which had questionable value to the org it sounds like this was the case. Depending on the size of the team, an engineering manager may even be dead weight and engineers should report to a technical founder or GM. But regardless, you actually are making the case that more rather than less product ownership and management is necessary to ensure that a product isn't dead on arrival -- after all, the symptoms you mention are of poor prioritization and product discovery/strategy (symptoms of poor/nonexistant active product management) rather than of poor engineering management (endless tech debt, production outages, awful on-call support, inability for the team to deliver features, unrealistic delivery roadmaps causing endless late nights with poor quality and buggy software delivery, attrition and difficulty recruiting).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gmail#Internal_deve...
I've never once had a manager say anything along the lines of "I just think we're building a bad experience if we release this early." I have heard them say all sorts of politics like "If we get this out now, then that'll prove massive impact that will free us up politically down the line"
Or for example I worked at a known location-sharing startup, and managers gave 0% thought to concerns like "hey is battery life impact worth measuring?" and kept pushing random integrations (like with Italian telecom company) hoping to get some huge amount of customers (which never payed off in my experience).
When I picture managers and directors I think of the idiots at Yahoo managing to fail to understand I need more than 15megs of storage or a spam filter (can't imagine what those managers were wasting their time ona), while a company of mostly engineers with scarcely any management builds gmail and eats their whole market.