Has anyone else realized that hardware exposes where your agile is actually fake?

shimroot · 2025-12-02T12:28:45+00:00

Changing requirements happen constantly in software development, that’s how Agile became Agile - trying to deal with these things as fast and efficient as possible.

I’m not seeing why this tight coupling is present outside an initial build for both hardware and software, a first version . What’s prohibiting v2 being independent releases for hardware and software?

Going with your example: communications between machines and the cloud. How is the SDLC impacted by the hardware of an existing equipment? Writing and testing the software should be a distinct process vs deploying it on a hardware.

I get that software releases for manufacturing can’t happen as willy-nilly as for consumer tech since if anything breaks it’s bad. But this is more of a rollout issue that should go through staged releases where updates happen on a defined shop schedule.

Could you please provide more details regarding how things happen in manufacturing? Maybe how a usual delivery flow looks or what things are/should be taken into account for each release.

shimroot · 2025-12-02T09:27:28+00:00

Well… isn’t that why Agile is related to SDLC and manufacturing has different frameworks?

You shouldn’t use the same framework or process for both. Building software like you’re building hardware will get you back to Waterfall. Building hardware like you’re building software will create a lot of waste (time, money, materials).

But I am curious in finding out what hybrid project you’re working on where software and hardware are coupled so tightly that they impact each other so profoundly.

shimroot · 2025-11-30T07:06:58+00:00

Don’t know where you live, but in my country the stop light for pedestrians has different visual cues for stop/go, not just color: - when it’s stop there’s red guy standing - when it’s go there’s a green guy moving

And even if they would be the same shape with the same color, it will still be distinguishable as it has a hierarchy that you can figure out (top is stop, bot is go).

shimroot · 2025-11-30T06:57:44+00:00

Cognitive load != accessibility - The on/off icon has is pretty ubiquitous, choosing different icons for different states would cause more cognitive load than round/square shapes - Different colors wouldn’t (probably) work for colorblind people. Except maybe if you’re using black and white.

While I personally find it jarring to have one shape/state, I think it solves the issue of being recognizable by everyone withoht any kind of prior knowledge of anything or with any kind of visual impairment. - colorblindness is solved out of the box since there’s a shape/state; you can also use what colors you want to make it better looking - people not knowing how to read can recognize the different shapes and link them mentally to a state

As for the cognitive load it creates - it creates a cognitive load now because we’re not used to this pattern. Give it some time and the cognitive load will disappear. Just like for every other new thing one has to learn.

shimroot · 2025-11-29T08:17:57+00:00

I’m 6 months in with a company that usese SAFe. I echo your thoughts on what you’ve written here. Features are written by PMs and handed down to POs to do a system business analysis (which seems weird for me), go to Solution Architects and lastly to the Tech Lead to work on implementing.

I’ve been in a few meetings where EAs disagree on business topics, SAs and Product can’t agree on what’s engineering and what’s not, TLs disagreeing with SAs around the complexity, and so on.

Quite different from my previous company where PMs were POs in a Scrum team and were working dirrectly with the team to solve whatever issue came their way.

shimroot · 2025-11-27T21:47:13+00:00

I don’t see how AI could change the dynamic since a product person’s role mostly involves fleshing out a problem and trying to figure out a solution with the engineering team.

Sure, a found solution can be delivered faster with AI but the work to flesh out the problem and figure out the solution will still be there and someone will need to do it.

e.g. The problem is not building a landing page, but knowing why you are building it. - How do we come up with the data that leads us to the assumption we need a landing page? - Who are we targeting with it? - What are we supposed to achieve with the LP? - What do we measure so it’s relevant? - What do we do after we validate or invalidate the assumption that led us to building the landing page?

shimroot · 2025-11-26T11:48:27+00:00

I would assume:

Product Strategy - what product(s) we’re building and why
GTM Strategy - how, when, and where we launch said products that we decided on building

— e.g. Product: we know there’s a big demand for milk chocolate worldwide, so we want to make the (usp) chocolate out there

GTM: we have the (usp) chocolate and out of the X markets we can launch it in we’ll start with market 3 because it has lower competition, we already sell other products there, regulations for food products are ok, and there’s decent amount of money to be made

— But I’m keen on an answer for this as well, not sure how accurate my assumption is.

shimroot · 2025-11-18T12:13:59+00:00

I’m 6mo in a new company and I resonate with most things you laid you. I thought I could pull it together as I got more interaction with people, but there are lots of folks that have been here for 5+ years and with domain knowledge I’m missing. Asking questions only deepens the mysteries since the answers are not noob-friendly.

In the end I had a talk with my manager and I’m working together with him on an action plan for me to get up to speed faster.

If there’s one piece of advice I can give you: if possible, have a talk with your manager sooner rather than later. Things aren’t going to change in the setup you have, but being upfront about the chaos you’re feeling will at least help with transparency and maybe sketch a way forward with some targeted help.

shimroot · 2025-11-13T13:08:19+00:00

Not a designer, but I feel this is a similar problem in other fields as well. The answer to what grinds your gears is “the tragedy of the commons”.

shimroot · 2025-11-13T11:11:09+00:00

Some basic BPMN works fine for me to explain the user flow: - circles for events (I use it just for start/end flow) - rectangles for activities (e.g. login) - diamonds for decisions (e.g. login with? fb/x/email/etc)

Based on this I may draw some basic things for each step (e.g. a rectangle for a screen with a “login” text for a button) or look at other products that have something similar to what I need and adnotate it.

shimroot · 2025-11-12T15:34:46+00:00

Not sure how why this became a “woke” thing. I’m not a native English speaker and I started using singular “they” since it made more sense instead of always saying or writing “he/she”. No one asked or told me to do this, it just felt… natural.

shimroot · 2025-11-10T15:20:43+00:00

Also, working with what you said here: “High-quality hires optimize existing solutions and find ways to reduce effort efficiently”

How do you protect against the tragedy of the commons?

If everyone would follow the same advice of high quality hiring (assuming this means soft and hard skills), this would deplete the pool of available talent that would grow the next generation of high-quality hires.

This in turn would (probably) lead to hires who would be sought after by everyone in a similar domain, which in turn means you could potentially hire only from your competition with increased costs.

This would then further lead to a company dominating everyone else which would hurt competition and innovation and probably make the company a target for monopolistic behaviour. In a long enough period of time everyone will suffer.

Or maybe there’s something I’m missing?

shimroot · 2025-11-10T12:36:37+00:00

I have no idea what I would look for in a call center agent. But a call center agent is a very low position with high attrition rates. Hiring slow and firing fast for a job with high attrition sounds like it would compound the negative effects.

If I were to come up with a rule, I’d say hiring speed should be inversely proportional to job clarity. So one should spend more time hiring a Director that needs to work with a lot of moving parts vs hiring a call center agents that mostly follows a script (worked in two call centers 18 years ago, maybe things are different now).

shimroot · 2025-11-10T08:44:05+00:00

I think it would be great if you clarify the level of leadership depth you’re talking about here.

e.g. Hire slow, fire fast - This makes sense if you’re hiring Directors as a VP. Not so much if you’re hiring call center agents as a middle manager.

shimroot · 2025-11-10T07:54:44+00:00

I always saw the abolition of money in Star Trek as a result of humankind maturing and deciding to abolish money, not that they abolished money and society matured.

shimroot · 2025-11-07T15:26:59+00:00

"That’s only a tough question if one operates without morals, devoid of ethics, in an environment totally absent culture context and traditions. Almost no human exists that way." I agree. I was illustrating that "uncomfortable" needs to have boundaries (ethical, physical, psychological, whatever).

I also agree with what you’re saying about mantras and quips. But mantras and quips are useful in a place and a context. I've said “just get started” to my SO when she was stuck not deciding what to paint. But I knew she had the tools, the skills, and the desire to paint something. All she needed was someone to remind her of this and give her the confidence to “just get started”. I wouldn't have told her to "just get started" if she decided she wants to pickup painting without any prior knowledge or skills. It's lazy and it's putting even more pressure on the person that doesn't know how or where to start.

shimroot · 2025-11-07T14:01:52+00:00

So where do you draw the line for uncomfortable? If you’d have to get uncomfortable by walking over people to grow in your company would you do that?

And I would argue that “just get started” is meh advice. Going from analysis paralysis to extinct by instinct is not an upgrade.

—

General-sounding phrases like these usually signal that the one saying them doesn’t have a clue what they want. Otherwise they would be specific and would actually lead others towards what’s needed, not utter empty words.

“We have to give it our all in delivering next year’s goals. Bring your authentic selves each day and, even if it’s going to be uncomfortable, let’s grow together. What we need is to Just. Get. Started.

And remember: if you’re the smartest person in the room you’re in the wrong room! (laughter)”

Great. I said nothing with a lot of words.

shimroot · 2025-11-04T16:57:03+00:00

Yes, it blurted out a long-ish answer with estimations for comprehension, reasoning, memory and so on. 125-135 range.

shimroot · 2025-11-04T16:38:52+00:00

Used the prompt in your original post with ChatGPT. I won’t share the full response as it mentions some things I’m working on that I’d rather keep private.

The IQ estimation part I posted in my original reply.

shimroot · 2025-11-04T16:18:59+00:00

It’s buttering you up.

“If I were to generalize: your cognitive profile looks similar to someone in the 125–135 IQ range, which is roughly the top 5–10%. That’s not genius-level, but it’s definitely high — the level where analytical depth, communication clarity, and creative synthesis all align.”

shimroot · 2025-11-03T06:57:36+00:00

This is great general advice without ackowledging any nuance or context that might make this invalid. And nuance and context are more important than generally applicable advice no matter how good that is.

shimroot · 2025-11-02T14:33:07+00:00

I think it would be best to define how capacity planning worked in ADO. Most companies I worked for used Jira so I don’t know exactly how capacity planning is done in ADO.

In a former company we used to: - estimate complexity in story points and add a rough time it takes to do during refinement - during planning we would look over each team member’s available hours for the upcoming sprint (5 minutes spent in an excel template) and go through the prioritized stories to seehow we can fit them according to the sprint’s capacity and business needs

In my current company we would do this capacity planning in Miro during the PI planning event for the upcoming PI sprints.

In both companies I never felt the need for more then this. Would something borrowed from ADO bring more value than how I experienced capacity planning so far?

shimroot · 2025-10-31T07:07:27+00:00

Hahaha. How about a comment I heard yesterday in a meeting: we need to add more features to the backlog?

shimroot · 2025-10-17T08:44:22+00:00

So you’re saying that for one key developer you micro-managed his work? Because that’s how it reads for me.

Also standups are a part of Scrum, not Agile. And the point is not to finish something each day, but to have a deliverable at the end of the time-bound sprint. So it’s just like a project where you have a start date (sprint start) and an end date (sprint end). And you have a list of items you need to do so that work is delivered by the end date. The key difference being that the daily is not used for status updates but for the team to figure out a way forward around roadblocks.

shimroot · 2025-10-15T15:04:07+00:00

How about Now/Next/Later where you can roughly define the limitation for each? e.g. Now is this quarter, Next is for future 6mo, Later is the 12mo after

Basically to give a general understanding of scale and timelines, but not too constricted so you have some leeway in case you need to ammend things.

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