> Writing code as a team is almost like writing a novel with a few dozen other people, all of which have differing ideas on how the book should be written, or even what it should be about.

I use this exact description when discussing balancing creative side of the value creation project processes, design and development over the value extraction side of products. Small empowered teams with an almost startup mindset is key, but even more is time to play to find solutions that can make products that are more like friends than enemies to people.

Engineering/development, creative and product design/development are creative fields, a value creation action and activity.

Business, finance, marketing do not see many parts of this as a creative action but a production line, a value extraction action and activity.

A large problem is the misunderstanding that new projects are value creation not just value extraction, and rely on creativity at inception. Once they are established they can be more patterned and predictable and ramped up, but initially the creative phase is the key to making good products. Smaller teams, more empowering of the people that can create products that get the early points right. Taking long enough in the "open" mode before the "closed" mode is key, essentially prototyping and play is needed, but rarely available in the modern processes and project management systems where engineering is simply "production". There is a pre-production and post-production that is usually left out.

For instance in game development, pushing through a project process before the main game mechanic is "fun" is a problem. You can't get creative on a forced schedule just as you couldn't write a book that way or come up with a novel new concept in some software app that should be a friend to users. The prototype of the project or product must have some time to simmer and iterate on. The first thing managers do is cut that time and sometimes throw too many people at it resulting in Mythical Man Month level mistakes leading to too many cooks. When a prototype or early product has value mostly figured out, then it can go into a more robust process to create variations or iterations. The initial value creation will always be wildly hard to estimate.

Good examples of this in software are programming languages, usually it is one person for a long time then others join in to ramp up when the vibe of the language is set. Same with books, movies, games, anything really. You can't have 10 people drawing the same illustration or writing the same book, the parallel part can be multiple people doing their own to see which is best, but you can't have them all in on one creative project without it being confused.

I have seen companies turn into faction based wars when varying groups don't clearly respect the value creation and value extraction balance, the value creation MUST come before the value extraction. The open mode before the closed mode.

A great talk by John Cleese on the "open" and "closed" mode [1] helps describe this, which I recommend and hope everyone I work with watches. Value creators need time and creativity to create value both in the "open" mode to explore/prototype/build and the "closed" mode when things are decided to ship. The value extractors always want people in the controlled "closed" mode only, the "open" mode is non quantifiable and seen as almost an enemy to the value extractors but is key to creating products that are so good they are like friends to value creators and the people using the products.

The value extractors are who Fred Brooks talked about in the Mythical Man month [2], they think things are a factory with already figured out steps, when you are in a field that uses originality, creativity, the mind over the physical, it isn't like a factory or supply line. Every single project manager needs to know about the Mythical Man month.

Here's a great point by Steve Jobs about product stagnation and the managers/business side [3] and how they can run amok if not controlled to allow value creation to continue, and how monopolies or problems that arise when only the business/managers are in charge. This point is more about larger companies than new projects but the same forces that stop innovation at large companies also kill it in any sized companies when there is no value creation / value extraction balance.

> It turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM or Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful.

> So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product.

> They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers.

Modern project management processes promote shallow change over deeper dives. They create a risk profile for anyone looking to bring new innovations that might be hard to estimate because it will be a perceptual hit. These rigid tightly wound processes are horrible for creativity. Agile itself has been captured with tightly wound controlling mechanisms like the daily standup, and so much weight around trying new things as well as perceptual hits for that. Anyone truly trying to make new value will be seen as an enemy to these systems. Agile was created to give product people more margin to build, but it has been coopted into being used to control creativity which cannot be controlled, it simply disappears when there is no open mode and only a closed mode or nothing but value extraction.

All of this is spelled out in "How Software Companies Die" as well [4]. I wonder when if these realities will make it into the business education curriculum.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

[3] https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-on-why-innovation...

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1866486