There's a lot of virtue in that, and managers prefer that just as much as engineers do. But sometimes it's as the article says: "Your organization might not have the luxury of years of runway, and the environment you're operating in is rapidly changing". If you've got a big customer making 20% of your revenue who's threatening to jump ship (not an uncommon scenario for small to medium sized companies), you simply have to deliver whatever they want as fast as you can and worry about your vision later.
Either your product is at its core useful, or its not. If the environment is rapidly changing, either your product is still relevant, and you should be focusing on stability, or it's no longer useful and it's too late to change that.
> If you've got a big customer making 20% of your revenue who's threatening to jump ship (not an uncommon scenario for small to medium sized companies), you simply have to deliver whatever they want as fast as you can and worry about your vision later.
But that's one new requirement (or set of), not a changing environment. If that customer is changing their requirements as they go, so that you're constantly shifting focus, you need to either pin them down to one goal, or cut them loose and deal with the fallout. They don't see or care about the "war mode" they've created, and placating them will just invite more demands, and you can't keep it up forever.
The one time I've seen a "war mode" succeed was making a change that was a precondition for acquisition, when a set of requirements was laid out in the acquisition offer. It couldn't be altered once it was accepted, so the "war mode" had a fixed goal and deadline. Apart from something like that, it's just going to result in a spiral.
