Scene: Surprise meeting with the project owner 0-3 days before the go-live date
“Hey team, the business and I have decided to postpone the project release by n=1-3 months because [they aren’t ready for it / it isn’t finished /regulatory reasons]. And since we have some extra time now, we can tie up all the loose ends on this project (i.e., ‘we’ve added n+1 months worth of backlog items to the MVP’).”
I’m still a greenish dev, so maybe this is normal, but I’ve had the same story going on for over a year now, and it’s really starting to burn me out. In the beginning, I was optimistic. Now I just hope for the project to fail, or me to get off somehow, but this thing just won’t die.
Anyone with experience on similar projects able to share words of advice? Do they ever end up working out? Seems there’s a death spiral, since we are always rushing to a deadline, forgoing tests and quality but never cleaning up our mess because we’re already behind. Yet I somehow feel like I’m the crazy one for thinking this 6-month “quick” side project turned 2+ year half-rewrite will have trouble meeting it’s Nth deadline.
In my experience this does happen on occasion, it absolutely shouldn’t be happening all the time though.
Generally when this starts to happen my team lead puts his foot down and says, no more changes until you sign off on what we have and we’ve released the MVP. After all, if the core functionality is done, then the MVP is done and we don’t need to keep sitting on it.
I had a situation like this where I shut down production because a project manager didn’t understand MVP and kept trying to grow the requirements with every meeting, and getting more and more agitated and even bothering my staff.
He forced me into multiple meetings with my boss and HR to hear “both sides”. By the end of it, he relented, the project finally shipped, and then they fired him.
It sucks that he was fired, but I don’t understand how anyone is confused by the term MVP.