Software and Product Development Remain in the Dark Ages

These days, technology moves at lightning speed with new tools and platforms constantly emerging. But evolution in the way we organise for software and product development often feels like it’s crawling along at a snail’s pace. The way we build apps and products is lagging way behind what’s possible. A big reason for this is that businesses still use outdated and egregiosly ineffective practices for organising both their teams and the way the work works.

Companies Bogged Down in Bureaucracy

Larger companies are weighed down by bureaucracy that crushes agility and innovation. The  Command and Control management style remains ubiquitous, we continue with inflexible planning processes, and unnecessary documentation requirements. What could take a few weeks or months gets dragged out over years of committees, approvals, shilly-shallying, and shifting goalposts.

Teams work silos that block collaboration across groups that need to work together. Protectiveness and territoriality are rampant. Priorities also constantly change with leadership turnover, favouring reactive firefighting over long-term strategy. Software and product people spend more time navigating corporate politics and protecting themselves than doing actual work.

Skewed Work Incentives

Developer and product manager motivation suffers because incentives are misaligned. Individual rewards are based on checking arbitrary boxes rather than doing great work. Perceived job insecurity inhibits taking risks or sharing knowledge.

There is also misguided prestige around working on proprietary codebases and reinventing from scratch. This holds back reusing proven architectures and open sourcing for community collaboration. Inefficiently re-building wheels becomes the norm as devs find motivation in custom solutions over composable building blocks.

Outdated Approaches

Approaches like Agile, DevOps, and cloud computing have helped to a limited extent. But these are incomplete solutions patching over outdated and ineffective organisational foundations rather than rethinking from a clean slate.

Hierarchies are flattened but still exist. Command and Control still predominates. Planning iterates but still relies on traditional projections rather than real-world feedback loops. Migrating to the cloud layers complexity on creaky legacy systems instead of fully modernising as cloud-native.

Renaissance

Truly revolutionising how we build software and products invites a top-to-bottom overhaul, not just tweaks to our present approaches. Organisations could be reimagined from the ground up with different workflows, team structures, and incentive systems. In fact, with a whole host of outdated and relatively ineffective assumptions and beliefs consigned to the trashcan of history.

This could mean, for example, far flatter teams organised around end-to-end product missions rather than subdivided tasks. Compensation might be overhauled to favor collective outcomes and attending to folks needs over individual heroics and pay-per-hour. Business models favouring self-organisation could enable healthier evolution of the way the work works. For a comprehensive list of what “better” looks like, see my books “Quintessence” and “Memeology“.

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution, but one thing is clear. If we want software and product development to leap into the future, first we have to drag our organisational assumptions and beliefs out of the Dark Ages.