Comments for https://www.rubick.com/engineering-leaders-should-obsess-over-feedback-loops/

I agree that engineering leaders should obsess over feedback loops. The issue I see is that the focus tends to be on velocity and getting the feature in customer's hands and not so much on understanding whether or not the feature addressed the customer's problem or is even being used. I had the experience of being pressured by a specific customer to deliver releases on a specific date. This was on-premise software and our "release overhead" (integration testing & packaging) was an astonishing 1 month. Even more astonishing was that 1/3 of these releases were never installed by the customer.

A long time ago (prior to the agile manifesto), I wrote an article on Evolutionary Delivery from my experience as an engineering manager and consultant at Hewlett-Packard. The team I led as engineering manager did 1 week cycles/sprints with customer feedback solicited and incorporated in future iterations. I'm not saying every team can or should operate at that pace, but I think if you are obsessing about velocity without obsessing about collecting and incorporating customer feedback, you're missing the point.