alt Hacker News> Product and design are the new bottleneck
Product and design were always the bottleneck. Engineering speed was never the issue, it was the politics and indecision in product that always slowed engineering teams down. I can't count how many prep meetings product had before they presented to their boss what the new font and color looks like. They basically had a team of PMs just running around creating busy work and making decision based on pure whim and personal feeling, without actually looking at any data. And God forbid they ever talk to customers. Ew, who cares about what they have to say.
Replies
I think it depends on the org, I did Product Design at a FAANG and 90% of the design was held back by engineering "appetite" and even then they would implement at best 60% of the UI to spec. This was building semi-niche professional products, not consumer so that was used as an excuse for not wasting time on polish.
That being said, I've recently made a few light weight apps for myself with Claude and I've easily spent 4x the time hand tuning the UI compared to implementing business logic / core features. Super fun tbh
I buy that product and design are bottlenecks. I don't buy that engineering is not also a bottleneck.
Engineers like to claim everyone else is their problem, when in fact, it's often the case that engineers are their own problem.