“It didn't move the business at all. … We actually did not solve the bottleneck. The bottleneck, as it turned out, was not engineering delivery speed. To be honest, that was our hypothesis. Our hypothesis was, if only engineering would go faster and more reliably, we'd be better. … And it turns out the bigger set of problems was the top-down management structure of the old-style annual plan. … If you don't have a culture of learning and improving, you can't take advantage. Here's this Ferrari, and you don't know which direction to drive it.”
Refactoring · Software Engineering & Infra · November 2026
Context
The host asked whether the eBay program Shoup led, which made teams roughly 10x faster at deploying, actually moved the business. Shoup says it did not, because the real bottleneck was upstream planning and culture, not engineering speed.
Transcript
Yeah.
And so I also know that after you've done all such work, but I want to hear from you. You didn't think this moved the business a lot in the end. Yeah,
it didn't move the business at all. And does that mean I am not proud of it? No, I'm so proud of my team. Like the world is a better place because the teams are high performers instead of medium performers. Like everybody's much happier. And also, again, if you take the, and that was looking at, that's like looking at the value stream map from the perspective of the software engineering organization. But when you look at the value…
Yeah.
Or you're, yeah, you don't like, yeah, again, this is analogies coming to me right away. And because, you know, since you're Italian. So like imagine, yeah, imagine you get in a Ferrari and you do not know how to double clutch or whatever. Okay. Like, like an expert, you know, Verstappen knows how…
Yes.
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