It's a shame when management fails at understanding this aspect of the game because I feel like it's one of the simplest ones to understand.
Appeasing clients? Balancing profit/loss? Juggling fire-fighting and feature-shipping? Recruiting? Hiring?
Hard, hard, hard, hard, hard.
Listening to your developers, who generally just want to be productive and generally know more than anybody else about how they can be productive? (If not, why did you hire them, if they don't know how best to do their jobs?) Understanding that technical debt exists and exerts a massive drain on future productivity?
I feel like those are the easy parts of the job.
Of course, the onus is on developers to communicate these things well. Otherwise we can't blame management for not understanding them. But I have never seen process break down because developers weren't talking. It always seems to fail because management isn't listening.
Appeasing clients? Balancing profit/loss? Juggling fire-fighting and feature-shipping? Recruiting? Hiring?
Hard, hard, hard, hard, hard.
Listening to your developers, who generally just want to be productive and generally know more than anybody else about how they can be productive? (If not, why did you hire them, if they don't know how best to do their jobs?) Understanding that technical debt exists and exerts a massive drain on future productivity?
I feel like those are the easy parts of the job.
Of course, the onus is on developers to communicate these things well. Otherwise we can't blame management for not understanding them. But I have never seen process break down because developers weren't talking. It always seems to fail because management isn't listening.