In her post on LinkedIn, Laura Cotterill (one of my new coworkers) refers to Eric Chan’s post about teamwork and wonders why such a seemingly obvious mode of work is out of reach so much of the time. To which I responded
My impression is:
1) When we pressure people to overproduce we encourage them to defend themselves in ways that seem locally sensible but turn out to be anti-collaborative.
2) Financial planning, especially when the business is not self-funded, tends to require a forecast; that forecast hangs from a roadmap, effort estimates, and sales targets.
3) When a business sees the sales team as its economic engine rather than the product itself (sales teams tend to be good at preserving this impression), opportunities detected by sales get pushed onto that roadmap with less discussion than necessary.
Of these I find the first the most pernicious.