Beyond Agile: The Studio Model

I do agree with the original author that software development needs a clear vision of what you’re trying to achieve. Without someone to articulate that vision and then everyone working to realise it, it is easy to fall into a trap where lots is going on and yet there is little useful progress being made. What you characterise here as a bottleneck, I might characterise as having focus. This is very much about the big picture and co-ordinating different contributions, though, not about micro-management.

I also have a lot of sympathy with the argument that software projects don’t necessarily add value incrementally just because the code is being developed incrementally. To borrow the traditional bad car analogy, you can have the most ergonomic steering wheel ever designed and you can put the best performing tyres on your rims, but until you’ve connected them, the value of the overall product is still negligible.

Of course software is different in nature to a physical product, but I still think the critical point in the development process — where you have not just evidence of product-market fit and potential market but a sustainable offering that you can actually sell in large enough volumes or at a high enough price to justify the development — is often only reached towards the end of a major round of development work. Visibility of incremental progress towards that point might be reassuring and motivating, but neither of those is the same as having value as a deliverable product. So while I’m all for manageable, incremental, sustainably paced development, I do think there is a real world danger of emphasising that too much and consequently taking an unnecessarily circuitous route to the critical point, making the development slower and more expensive than it could have been.