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Darren Lang

Please help an accountant understand product dev struggles

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Hey Product Hunt community,

I’m an accountant 🤓, not a tech person, so I’m out of my depth trying to understand product development challenges as well as most of you. Please can you help me with this.

I’m researching how product development teams get derailed - say, a sprint fails because of misaligned skills or unexpected delays. What’s the worst issue you’ve faced running a product team? How do you handle it? Any tools or methods that actually work, or are you still searching?

Thanks for the help🙏,

Darren

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Manu Goel

1) Lack of clarity on what problem they are solving - When this happens teams are not building but just executing their tasks. No ideas come to the table and assumptions are wrong. Causes big delays. So, it's not just the requirements that matter but also the overall objective of the product.

2) Lack of clarity on architecture at a high level -- yes, iterative approaches work but basic very high level idea has to be put on the board quickly lest you lose track. Upfront tech PoCs, upfront performance tests mitigate the risks in a big way.

3) Improper estimation techniques - Just finger-in-the-air estimates instead of clear quantitative reasoning.

4) Plans not incorporating leaves, holidays and contingency.

5) Wrong practices adopted in the name of speed e.g. code structure, environments (dev/test/prod), CI/CD ignored

These are the top 5 in my experience

Darren Lang

@manu_goel2 , thank you. This is very instructive and helpful. Have you experienced these first hand?

It seems that many of these issues stem from poor collaboration and communication.

Manu Goel
@darren_lang_kepler yes, I have experienced these and resolved these first hand for 20+ years. In fact, that lead me to create experience-based frameworks which are quite different from what books say… Yes, collaboration and communication are of course the broad cover on top of all this … the specifics within that is what I have highlighted
Darren Lang

Thank you, @manu_goel2.

Vadim Archugov

Development is a very unpredictable job) My top 3:

  1. Team members are afraid/unwilling to ask for help and try to solve all problems themselves. This is something that can and should be worked on!

  2. Context switching. It's a really problem, ex.: "Hi, can you help me with support task?" - and your developer switching for 2 hour, even if task for 15 minutes. For non-core activities, you need to allocate separate time, instead of the usual work process

  3. No planning, unexpected tasks. ex.: marketing comes with a task related to Black Friday 3 days before Black Friday) While the team is doing another major feature. The task from marketing will be done with high priority, and the main task will be delayed by at least a week (not 3 days), because see point 2 :)