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Fractals of Change: Managing Programming for CEOs Part 3 – Features Kill: "Managing Programming for CEOs Part 3 – Features Kill"

Microsoft[base ']s success is, in large measure, a testimony to Bill Gates[base '] skill in managing development projects.  Even Bill, however, had a feature-related fault, at least when I was at Microsoft.  Bill did not like to hear about the ship date of products slipping.  However, no sane manager would hide a slippage from Bill so there were some very tense meetings. 

Sometimes Bill[base ']s wrath could be allayed by agreeing to add features that he thought the product should have had anyway or that he could be convinced were cool.  The ostensible logic was that, given slippage in some critical path component, the other teams would have extra time to add more features. Wrong! Inevitably, more features meant more delay.