Every Direction at Once
I've been working on a project for the last year. The goal was to migrate data from one system into another, with my team providing the data layer. We started as two developers and were ahead of schedule. We had reservations about whether the migration was the right call, but that wasn't our decision to make, so we built what was asked for and got most of it working.
Then the priority changed. The migration target was for a team that wasn't generating revenue, which is a problem if you're potentially positioning a company for sale. So we were pulled off the original project and pointed at a different group - similar work, different data source, different requirements. The team grew right around the same time, and we made the changes to support the new group and started moving toward a go-live.
Then the go-live got pushed, and then pushed again. Somewhere in that gap, we were shifted back to the original migration project. Two days later, we were told to switch back to the new group's work. The deadline for that project kept slipping further out while we bounced between the two.
From inside the team, I just wanted to finish something. There's ramp-up time when you switch back, the context everyone was holding in their heads, and the momentum that was carrying the work forward. After enough switches, we started losing something harder to measure - our confidence that the current priority was actually the priority.
After we'd been redirected three or four times, the next time someone said "this is the direction," nobody on the team treated it as urgent. We didn't go deep on the new requirements because we were waiting to see if this one stuck. The work got shallower because investing fully in something that might get pulled away again felt like a bad bet. Keep that up long enough, and people start thinking about whether it's time to go somewhere else.
Our leadership didn't see this part of it. From above, shifting priorities feels like being responsive - reading the market, adapting to new information, making the smart call. When it happens four times on the same project with the same people, though, what they expect and what we're willing to give stop lining up.
I don't think the people making these calls intend for this to happen. In my experience, it usually comes from competing pressures above them - a potential sale, a revenue target, a stakeholder who changed their mind. Status reports don't capture what repeated direction changes do to the people doing the building. They show a team that's behind schedule on a project that's been "in progress" for a year, with no explanation for why that doesn't feel right.