Product Managers Love Features Like Engineers Love Commits

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Product managers love features because they are demonstrable proof that shit happened. It can boil down to a shift in blame: you can't blame me that the customer didn't like it, look at this list of things that got done! It's bigger than anyone else's list! It's an objective measure, where 3 hastily crapped out features are better than 1 awesome feature.

Engineers have an equivilent: commits and lines of code. If I'm worried about other engineers or my boss viewing me as unproductive, I can just show a montrous diff and what are you going to say? 'Just Shit It Out' create a massive mess, but at least I can wave my arms around and brag about the sheer quantity of crap that I produced. A phrase we had in college was 'quantity is its own quality.' We were justifying purchasing 2 handles of plastic-bottle vodka over 2 bottles of the nicer stuff.

Quality is harder. It's harder because it takes more thought, more work, and you often get less cumulative things in the end. Oh, you refactored the core logic for our business? Yeah but in the end you netted us -100 lines of code in a week and a half of work, while Johnny typed out 500 lines. He's a true hacker rock-wizard.

And so you look back after a year or two of hacking it out, and realize that you're development productivity has halved. But who can blame you?? You've #shipped more lines than anyone!

Readable version:

Product managers love features because they are demonstrable proof that shit happened. It can boil down to a shift in blame: you can't blame me that the customer didn't like it, look at this list of things that got done! It's bigger than anyone else's list! It's an objective measure, where 3 hastily crapped out features are better than 1 awesome feature.

Engineers have an equivilent: commits and lines of code. If I'm worried about other engineers or my boss viewing me as unproductive, I can just show a montrous diff and what are you going to say? 'Just Shit It Out' create a massive mess, but at least I can wave my arms around and brag about the sheer quantity of crap that I produced. A phrase we had in college was 'quantity is its own quality.' We were justifying purchasing 2 handles of plastic-bottle vodka over 2 bottles of the nicer stuff.

Quality is harder. It's harder because it takes more thought, more work, and you often get less cumulative things in the end. Oh, you refactored the core logic for our business? Yeah but in the end you netted us -100 lines of code in a week and a half of work, while Johnny typed out 500 lines. He's a true hacker rock-wizard.

And so you look back after a year or two of hacking it out, and realize that you're development productivity has halved. But who can blame you?? You've #shipped more lines than anyone!