The problem being. People don’t want to hear that it’s going to take them a while to get from 0 to 100%. They’d rather hear they can get from 0 to 99% in a day, then spend a month slogging through that last percent.
The wrong person in this type of role at a smaller company can things back significantly.
A bad principal/staff person has around the same level of impact as a bad manager/director, except it tends to cause more technical badness than social badness.
Now that I have more experience I realize he was more excited about cargo-culting big tech practices than about making sure our software was well-architected. We wasted so much time enthusiastically implementing his low-impact but technically exciting ideas.