No - I doubt any PM would write what I said. What I said is more a IC in tech saying
"Sure, what the PM asked for an laid out was X. But really, in the middle we found out the architecture didn't work as expected. So we pivoted and in doing so found more success using Y's Suggested Architecture"
Innovation and Tech is messy. More often than not, Your definition of success changes as time goes on as you get further into a project that's groundbreaking.
> Your definition of success changes as time goes on as you get further into a project that's groundbreaking.
If you fail to meet your original goal because you are not capable of doing it, and then you change your goal to accommodate this reality, it doesn't change the fact that you failed in your original goal.
If my goal is to go to Mars and I only make it to the moon because it turns our Mars is just too far away, even though I did something revolutionary, amazing, and extraordinary, it does not change the fact that I failed in my original goal.
I don't even consider this to be semantics. It's people trying to justify to themselves that there is no failure. You've literally failed by your own definition of what success is. Changing the definition of success doesn't change reality.
I disagree that this is justification of failure. If anything, it’s the opposite.
We failed in our goal. We also learned and developed things of real value while pursuing that goal.
This is salvaging what can be salvaged to make headway in an adjacent goal. That said...
> Your definition of success changes as time goes on as you get further into a project that's groundbreaking.
Sometimes the goal is, itself, a failure. It was born of not fully understanding the problem at hand. When the goal is stupid, but that is only discoverable by pursing that goal (ie “intent”), then redefining success is the right thing to do.
Simply by admitting this, you've already contradicted the person I was responding to.
His entire scribe is "what is failure? have we really failed? no" instead of "yeah we failed, but we can learn from it"
Failure is fine. Failure is expected. Failure is the best way to learn an iterate.
But then don't say "well we always got what we wanted out of it anyway, which was to learn" when your goal was "to build the ultimate fighter jet at this budget in this timeline"
I didn't get the same thing out of the comment you were responding to...but I otherwise agree with you entirely:
> Failure is fine. Failure is expected. Failure is the best way to learn an iterate.
and
> don't say "well we always got what we wanted out of it anyway, which was to learn" when your goal was "to build the ultimate fighter jet at this budget in this timeline"
> I didn't get the same thing out of the comment you were responding to
This is my fault, as I was mostly paraphrasing what he said in other comments. So that's just lazy commenting on my part, and probably I deserve downvotes for it.
"Sure, what the PM asked for an laid out was X. But really, in the middle we found out the architecture didn't work as expected. So we pivoted and in doing so found more success using Y's Suggested Architecture"
Innovation and Tech is messy. More often than not, Your definition of success changes as time goes on as you get further into a project that's groundbreaking.