One day I noticed the goals of a project manager in between slides and I noticed that all of their goals were short-term focused. And I've been thinking a lot about those goals since then because it got thinking about how project managers and developers can feel like they are working against each other. And I strongly believe the fix is simple: change those goals and align them with both business and maintainability values.
That particular project manager and I ended up stepping on each others toes. I was describing problems as the subject expert but the project manager was only focused on their goals which resulted in long-term efficiency decreasing. To oversimplify the problem I would say that the reason it became hard to do my job was because they were so good at their job. Agile was used against the developers and became so rigid we didn't have time to address any technical debt, and corners were cut to meet superimposed deadlines.
One method to change this pattern is to change their goals, and that will likely include management getting onboard. The goals of the company cannot be solely focused on meeting short term deadlines and they need to realise that any long term goals can be pushed back much further if they try to hit the short term goals. The ultimate goal is to ship code faster but to maintain a consistent high speed you will need to slow down you short term velocity. And this is where most companies get stuck: you need to slow down to keep going fast. It is a really hard sell. So how do we sell something we know is true to someone that is not feeling our points? I've been explaining this for over 10 years and it has not landed. It is an easy problem to solve but a hard solution to sell.
What would happen if there was visibility into long term efficiency?