Great engineering teams focus on milestones instead of projects
I&#x27;m not disagreeing with the article, I&#x27;m just wondering what painful &#x27;project&#x27; oritentated piece of work the writer has had to endure when it crashed into their life.<p>To my mind there are products and milestones as maybe a point releases within a product - Agile&#x2F;Scrum.
I&#x27;ve suffered many systems over the years, but this is the one that makes the most sense - and maybe most importantly demarcates responsibilities.<p>Projects are something external to this procress, product management (i.e. me) need to deal with it - a spanner in the works of what we were all happily orchestrating.<p>&quot;A project&quot; is a demo we need to make next week, or a customer requirement the next release needs to address. It&#x27;s something the product needs to deal with - and PM decides whether this should impact dev.<p>It&#x27;s the job of PM to sort out the backlog&#x2F;timeline of the product so it hits the new eternal &quot;project&quot; requirement. Dev shouldn&#x27;t even have to be aware the project exists - they&#x27;ll maybe see their backlog change and just have to deliver on that as normal.<p>Obviously the reality is that they&#x27;re aware of the project once PM has accepted it, and you ask them to change their course - but dev shouldn&#x27;t directly care.