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Comment by bartread | Hacker News Reader

> Being aligned with teammates on what you're building is more important than building the right thing.

I don't buy this. I'm not sure these two things should be placed in opposition (or at least tension) in this way. It makes for a nice soundbite but I don't think it withstands scrutiny.

I've seen and worked in teams where alignment was great and we all worked really well together but, at the end of it all, nobody bought the damn product. I.e., we didn't build the right thing. Let's not kid ourselves: aligning and working well together to build the wrong thing is somewhat pointless (granted, you might learn some useful lessons along the way). Now, if you take that team and then assign them to build the right thing you have something really powerful.

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The way I took it -

If your cross functional team (Product, UX/Design, Eng) are aligned, it doesn't matter if you build the wrong thing initially, because you'll follow a good agile and/or lean process to validate early and thus learn what you should be building earlier.

It's not saying 'being aligned is more important that building valuable things' - but "if you focus on building a team that functions well operationally and strategically, you'll figure out how to build the right thing quicker".

I read it more like this:

If you are building right thing, but you are not aligned, then you will not build the right thing and you will fail. But if you are aligned, it's easier to steer the ship closer to the right thing.

Sure.

But I've seen too many dev departments building crap over and over again and feeling pretty good about themselves the whole time.

> building crap over and over again and feeling pretty good about themselves

I'm triggered

I wonder how few wrote something that in their own opinion wasn't crap and did something impressive.

Technically maybe.

I read that as building “the right thing” there are certain architectures that are pretty well known to be best practices at scale, or at least are fad enough that that’s what the consultants can push. On the other hand a well aligned team that meets business objectives while using out of date language, framework, unscalable architecture, etc delivers a lot more value and is generally easier to be a team member of.

Then he should have said "building the thing right" rather than "building the right thing".

In sports and esports this is a well known paradigm. The team committing to execute a poorly strategised play, is much more effective than uncohesive action towards a well strategised play.

If everyone is on the same page, the execution will be great even if the idea/requirements are not perfect. Which is better than a a perfect idea executed poorly.

Is it though? It's different because eSports involves training.

So you're comparing untrained team with a trained one, and as software is not as reproducible, it is not applicable here.

I'd recon a team of worse programmers following a great plan will produce worse results than a team of great programmers following no plan.

>Now, if you take that team and then assign them to build the right thing you have something really powerful.

Except if not aligned then the team won't actually build the right things but their own personal conflicting views of the right things.

Alignment and having a team that values the right things are not opposites. However, if a team doesn't value the right thing then trying to force them to won't achieve anything.

> Except if not aligned then the team won't actually build the right things but their own personal conflicting views of the right things.

Read the remark in context and you'll see that at this point I was talking about a team that is aligned and is building the right thing, and that is really powerful. Sorry if it was expressed clearly enough.

I agree. Group Think is bad in general. When no one is permitted to speak their mind and is encouraged to just go along with things, that's generally a bad environment.

There were several of the bullet points that I thought fell under this. Nice soundbite, but doesn't really jive with reality.

This one is probably the most egregious though, in that great software is created BECAUSE people aren't aligned and those discussions/fights are had.

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