You are probably right. Funny, it’s product development that builds the product to begin with, the thing of value that generates revenue to pay the salaries of all these supporting roles like finance. Those roles are then planned for and filled. At some point a business silently becomes a financial instrument itself and product development in turn becomes just a resource or investment, that needs to be planned. While truth is, the product still is the business’ reason d’etre. Does this phenomenon have a name?

Bureaucracy.

It's the phenomenon where the actual work increasingly gets pushed aside to make room for recording information about the work.

Jobs of higher and higher complexity get invented to measure and analyse this meta-work, ostensibly in the name of productivity. But I suspect a large portion of it is just the paper-pushing meta-workers making jobs up in order to fill their time.

Bureaucracy? Sure. It's very visible, to everyone at all these companies.

How about putting this in the context of a company & product like Coca-Cola though? It's not bad for them per se, to hand over the reins to finance/commerce/bureaucracy. Can we call it a "business cycle" perhaps?

Management, in particular for soft drink and FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) there's brand management (marketing, sales channels, target audience, product placements in movies, communicating with the consumers, coming up with new creative ideas every quarter to keep the brand fresh, managing advertisements, etc).

Basically after a certain size the question is not how to make the product better, because ... it's what it is. It's a mature product. Sure, there are sometimes quirky versions, seasonal versions, promotional versions, but the high-level focus is on keeping the market share, and to grow it if possible.

For example at that level it just makes sense to pay for lobbyists. To know where health regulation is going (soft drink tax), and of course CocaCola probably tried and tires to contest these proposals on many levels.

Bureaucracy is the process of adhering to processes, management is the process of coming up with new processes. Then of course the bigger the whole enterprise the more these seem to be ... the same.

Well said. So on a company's road to success, opportunities can arise in different corners of the international landscape. Understanding that, it makes sense that a small journey with enough time and distance becomes an enterprising voyage.

But then the question is, how does management determine whether to stay an enterprising voyage (eg exploring space endlessly) or become a settlement (eg McDonalds franchise)? Maybe the analogy ends here.

shareholders decide that implicity by hiring the management that aligns with this or that idea/vision/style.

and society at large (culture!) decides what is a worthwhile endeavor, for example by pre-ordering space telescopes, or by complaining loudly and shaming anyone who does not behave like good McDonalds patronizing people.

Society?

Financialization?

Financing and, I'd add, feasibility assessments. A good plan may reveal that a given project is simply unachievable given the resources available, providing info for a wise manager to avoid making huge mistakes.

Sometimes we technicians adopt such condescending tone, like this article's, out of ignorance. There are decisions whose underlying logic we won't fully comprehend while we don't consider factors outside tech and product design. This article seems to share the misbelief that plans are supposed to predict future. Granted, several managers also think like that, but many people who produce and consume long-term plans are relatively well connected to reality and understand their limits.

But feasibility assessment is basically about going to the engineers and saying, "we want to spend 6 months on product X -- can it be done to satisfaction in that time?" That's often a very easy question to answer reliably.

Long-term planning approaches the problem from the ass end of things. It's going to the engineers and saying "design feature X on paper for us" and once they've spent a month doing that, management says, in the best case*, "well, this work cannot be done for real in the remaining five months, so never mind".

The original question would have been answerable in a day without going into too much detail.

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* Best case. The more common case would be "well, now that we've spent a month planning this we better get the actual work done in the five remaining months, no matter what it takes!!"

I'm sorry but I couldn't disagree more.

We engineers can be really fast at refusing unrealistic estimates imposed by other departments, especially when we take them for loosers. But we are not very good at estimating as well, and we are often overoptmistic. I don't track my times too fanatically, but I do it +/- regularly and, still, I err way more than I think it's reasonable considering the data I have.

I don't think you are going to get much reliability on simply asking 1 question to an engineer, especially if you approach the matter with such overconfidence.

You might argue that an engineer would be more conservative and would avoid many mistakes by replying "no, it isn't feasible" more often than not, but then they would be wasting a lot of opportunities by discarding feasible projects, ruining the company as well, only in a different way

I never suggested asking just one person, to be clear!

You're right, I correct myself:

> asking 1 question to your engineers

Is your experience really that engineers cannot reliably estimate feasibility given a fixed budget, and that they have to be treated like children and asked for something completely different?

If they can't do their own feasibility assessments, they will be producing bad work, because there are many feasibility questions that arise during design and development, and never even make it to the parents^Wmanagement.

Then I feel like that's the bigger problem that needs to be handled with training, and perpetually working around it is still a bad idea.

> Nobody is going to give a development team a blank cheque to produce something they can't describe against no timeline.

You seem to be describing an issue of trust and risk assessment.

For instance most companies won’t micro-manage projects that probably last for a few days, as they trust their team and/or feel comfortable pulling the plug after a few days if it didn’t pan out: the risk is low enough.

Same way buying a new mouse probably requires less oversight than contracting thousand dollars of GCP for 3 years.

In that respect, how long a project can be before needing a fleshed out plan, internal milestones with verifiable deliverables and a set timeline comes down to how much the team is trusted.

> The reason we have deadlines and long term plans is financing. Nobody is going to give a development team a blank cheque to produce something they can't describe against no timeline.

This is true, and the usual proposed timeline is usually wildly inaccurate.