[recroad]

> 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.

[bmitc]

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.

[Mobius01]

Engineering is never the bottleneck… until it is. I have at this very moment months of completed design features that engineering should have already implemented if they were not in a constant churn of refactoring, reorganizing and spiking to fix self-inflicted defects.

Bottlenecks happen everywhere.

[9rx]

> I don't buy that engineering is not also a bottleneck.

Depends. It definitely can be. When you get those people who want to spend weeks going back and forth over whether the button should be red or slightly darker red, as if they can somehow figure out the right answer from gut feeling alone, not realizing that in that time they could have tried both and learned from it, all while delivering other things of value on top, engineering has no hope of becoming the bottleneck.

[throwaway-11-1]

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