There's a reason PMs are reviled to mildly tolerated by engineers: they believe the map is the end product, not the territory.
The correct answer to which is more important is "It depends."
There are many businesses where shipping 20% later leads to ceding first mover advantage and losing the game. Largely what's being discussed in the article.
More detailed and accurate project tracking and projection doesn't deliver quicker shipping. Effectively prioritizing outstanding work does.
They're similar but definitely not the same.
There are many businesses where shipping 20% later leads to ceding first
mover advantage and losing the game.
So in which business exactly does shipping 20% later lead to "losing the game"? If anything, the real risk is in shipping a half-baked product too soon.
The critical window isn't when something is first possible (e.g. when the first product appears), but when the combination of technical abilities, component price points, and market characteristics intersect to permit success.
To use a physical example, the iPod and iPhone were great products, but they were hits because they launched with the features they did, at a specific point in time, at a specific price point.
We know that potential for success infection point existed then, because they did build a working device and achieved success.
Consequently, if they had not completed those devices when they did (say, +20% time), another device could have achieved their success.
Maybe nobody on the planet existed other than Apple who could do it... but the possibility was provably there.
Or in simpler form: Netflix was far from the first streaming video service. They were the one who launched with the right features at the right time.
Nobody cares if you catch a small wave perfectly. What matters is catching the best wave of the day, in the brief window you have.
That's the reason that Apple, especially, has been so successful. It's not because they launched at some perfect time window. It's because they launched damn good products. If the iPhone had launched in 2008, or even 2009, it would have been just as successful. We just would have had another two years of mediocre Windows Mobile/Symbian OS/Blackberry devices.
[1]: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
The graphic UI and the case design were distinctive. But what really sold it was an incredibly sophisticated ad campaign that carpet bombed key media outlets with super-expensive exposure.
The problem with Symbian/Blackberry/Palm wasn't just mediocre technology, but a lack of dazzle. The products were functional but mediocre. But they were also marketed in mediocre geeky/corporate ways that just weren't that interesting to most consumers.
The original iPhone was barely more functional. But again, exterior aesthetics and a huge marketing and PR campaign forced open a consumer market for a product that was - like the original Mac - barely finished.
The problem Google has is that its products and its branding are heading rapidly towards mediocrity. It reminds me of DEC - an engineering giant in the 70s and 80s, which forgot how to read the market and innovate in the 90s, and crashed far more quickly than anyone would have predicted.
This. The ideal thing is to be second, or even third, not first. "The pioneers get all the arrows."
But as a member of a small-ish company, I remember there was this time the sales VP insisted that we MUST have this product out by a certain tradeshow. Engineering worked hard and delivered, and although the thing had warts, it gave our company an advantage: the current market leader showed up at the next tradeshow a couple months later (e.g. "20%") with a similar product and price point, but our lead in time meant that we were able to exist as a strong competitor. This single product launch and subsequent sequels lifted our company for quite a long time.
So now when the sales guys insist we might need something by a certain date, I carefully evaluate rather than dismiss out of hand - I've learned to trust their role as well.
Oh? By this rule, then Facebook must have been quickly replaced by one of the many competitors who launched later, yes?
Facebook bought Instagram in 2012 precisely because they were a direct threat. The FTC could have blocked that; or more recently, prevented tighter integration with FB+WA.
Currently they're using lobbyists to try to push TikTok (and WeChat) out of the US market.
Yahoo imploded because it had to pander to the short-term whims of the stock market; Zuckerberg references this frequently when talking about how FB (i.e. he) maintains control of its stock and autonomy.
This is it. With the advent of broad, powerful tools you can use to automate off your codebase, there's less and less manual rote work that needs tracking, and a greater and greater percentage of creative, hard to estimate, engineer-driven work. And the best way forward is to plan releases with certain features, and flexible timelines, or plan releases with fixed timelines, and flexible features.
You seem to want estimation. And you will keep doing exactly that, "wanting", because estimation isn't something that scales to big projects or multiple ones.
If we had something like a detailed blueprint before writing a line of code and the requirements were set in stone we could get a lot closer to other engineering disciplines in terms of predictability.
With the kinds of planning and estimating processes we do actually use you’re lucky to get within a factor of two of reality.
But there's also a step back -- how long does it take you to fully design, but not program, a particular piece of software? If you give a general contractor a particular set of blueprints, he can tell you roughly how long it will take to build, both the ideal number (if there are no scheduling or shipping delays) and what it probably will end up being. But if you tell an architect you want a design for a particular size and purpose and style of building, she can also tell you roughly how long it will take to draw that up.
How long does it take to design a particular piece of software? What makes a design take a day or a month to iron out, well enough that you can get a correct estimate of the amount of time it will take to build it?
I don't think we're good at that, as a profession.
We aren't. And, as an industry, we have managed to convince ourselves that's a good thing. Agile methodologies, after all, are an attempt at making such efforts unimportant.
Estimates in civil engineering are going to look just as bad as software if it was common to keep adding floors of different sizes to a building after it was complete followed by a “pivot” of turning the building into a support structure for a suspension bridge.
Software that is as rigid as tradition engineering projects in the real world can certainly be estimated, this happens in safety critical stuff all of the time. But the estimates are long, and requirements cannot change without massive delays, which is terrible for most software use cases.
Software companies don't do this much. I've worked at only one that charged for changes, and -- surprise -- such changes were very rare.
Source: this is what my Dad did for a living, and I spent a couple of years doing it in my twenties.
The requirements changes in construction projects are child’s play compared to the ridiculous stuff in software. “Oh, now that we have this data visualization app finished, please add in support for collaborative visualization exploration with synchronized views and voice chat.”
This is such a good example of prioritizing internal desires over customer needs.
> better tracking is how they will ship faster
My long experience is that heavy tracking is strongly correlated with slower shipping. Because tracking is treated as a substitute for actual domain competence.
To use a programming analogy, it's like the difference between latency and jitter for real-time systems. Many real-time systems will happily sacrifice considerable amounts of average latency, in order to minimize jitter. It's far better to have a process that completes in 200 ms every single time than it is to have a process that completes in 2ms most of the time, but, occasionally takes 2000ms.
Similarly, from a managerial perspective, it's far better to have a team that gives you good visibility, allowing you to plan for a completion date (even if that date is farther into the future than you'd like) than it is to have a team that mostly finishes projects quickly, but occasionally bogs down and takes a year to finish a project that was initially estimated at two months.
The problem is that far too many organizations have neither. They don't have visibility, and they finish projects late. For these organizations, your dichotomy is a false one — better tracking is how they will ship faster.