Signs You’re Working in a Feature Factory

> No connection to core metrics. Infrequent discussions about desired customer and business outcomes. Team cannot connect work to key business and customer satisfaction metrics. Impossible to connect iterations to “what matters most”

Sometimes (or often times) a companies "core metrics" aren't truly core to the customer and business outcomes, they are just the easiest things to measure.

Oops, just checked off all of them.

That list describes some frustrations I'm currently facing in my job.

Another symptom I perceive is that "Product Management" doesn't try to model anything about how the business really works or what mental schema users have for what's going on.

Instead they construct UI mock-ups of the data-entry fields/screens they think could somehow provide CRUD access, and demand that engineering integrates it with "whatever already happens."

This leads to the strange situation where the small engineering team often has to reverse-engineer the ball-of-mud code, to inform executives how things are "supposed" to work based on the ad-hoc demands once made by their predecessors.