The Best Product Engineering Org in the World

September 2023. New VP of Engineering. CEO asks 'How are you measuring productivity?' The honest answer: 'I'm not. It can't be done.' Not the career-extending response you're looking for. Three months in and it looks like you won't make it to month four.

Here's the play instead: 'If we had the best product engineering org in the world, what would it look like?' An hour later at the CEO's dining room table with index cards and sticky notes, you define six categories. People: not FAANG's definition of 'best' but yours—XP engineers who love teamwork and peer leadership. Internal Quality: stop big-bang rewrites, improve systems in place while you work. Lovability: build-measure-learn loops instead of detailed plans that predict the wrong thing. Visibility: forecast ranges based on historical data, not dates you can't hit. Agility: XP practices so you can change direction without creating a mess, and FaST so teams shift fluidly with business needs. Profitability: every engineering dollar changing your business trajectory.

The FBI spent $104.5 million on Virtual Case File with solid requirements and detailed planning. Seventeen months of analysis. Delivered exactly what was specified. Completely unusable. Canceled. That's what happens when you optimize for predictability instead of adaptation. You're never going to be the best product engineering org in the world. That's not the point. The point is having a shared definition of excellence your leadership team believes in, and constantly working toward it. When someone asks for the impossible, you respond by offering something valuable instead.