It works great when everyone is delivering day-long or week-long incremental features that lend themselves to nice screenshots.
But then you slowly start accumulating a backlog of difficult tasks that everyone avoids because they won’t sound good for the week. Technical debt accumulates as people cut corners in the interest of getting their weekly presentations out.
You can theoretically avoid it with enough trust, but the trigger for our collapse was a round of layoffs where the people with the most visible features were spared while people working on important backend work and bug fixes got cut. After that, it was game over.
It works great when everyone is delivering day-long or week-long incremental features that lend themselves to nice screenshots.
But then you slowly start accumulating a backlog of difficult tasks that everyone avoids because they won’t sound good for the week. Technical debt accumulates as people cut corners in the interest of getting their weekly presentations out.
You can theoretically avoid it with enough trust, but the trigger for our collapse was a round of layoffs where the people with the most visible features were spared while people working on important backend work and bug fixes got cut. After that, it was game over.