I am stuck with a delicate balancing act around this one.
Our organization arguably would not exist today if it were not for developers doing "too much" work on things before bothering others. Our product would certainly be worthless trash today if we had to design by committee for every feature. We took extraordinary risks that simply could not have been planned into reality. Most of those risks were taken by individual contributors without anyone being explicitly aware of the magnitude of those risks.
There is a price to be paid for asking permission. Especially if your team members lack the same vision/ambition and are unable to conceptualize the path you laid out. Clearly, this is a problem for both parties, but it is a big reason to sometimes go off on your own, build a whole goddamn thing in peace, and then show it to the team. When others see a complete solution, even if its not 100% what the business wanted, it makes the conversation substantially more productive. It's the fear of the unknown/unseen that makes project managers nervous in my experience. Why start a hard thing at all if the conclusion is ambiguous at best?
On the other hand, we lost ~4 major customers to technical iterations over time. This was something we could have avoided by polishing what we had at the time. Problem is, that thing we would have polished was an abject failure in terms of strategic sustainability for the organization and our customers at scale.
I think it's telling when you call this "asking permission". You should never need to "ask permission" to give customers some small amount of value with a short turnaround.
Our organization arguably would not exist today if it were not for developers doing "too much" work on things before bothering others. Our product would certainly be worthless trash today if we had to design by committee for every feature. We took extraordinary risks that simply could not have been planned into reality. Most of those risks were taken by individual contributors without anyone being explicitly aware of the magnitude of those risks.
There is a price to be paid for asking permission. Especially if your team members lack the same vision/ambition and are unable to conceptualize the path you laid out. Clearly, this is a problem for both parties, but it is a big reason to sometimes go off on your own, build a whole goddamn thing in peace, and then show it to the team. When others see a complete solution, even if its not 100% what the business wanted, it makes the conversation substantially more productive. It's the fear of the unknown/unseen that makes project managers nervous in my experience. Why start a hard thing at all if the conclusion is ambiguous at best?
On the other hand, we lost ~4 major customers to technical iterations over time. This was something we could have avoided by polishing what we had at the time. Problem is, that thing we would have polished was an abject failure in terms of strategic sustainability for the organization and our customers at scale.