An appreciated mentor of mine is a phenomenal professional and personal advisor, but when it comes to project management of software, he seems to falter. Project management is not one-size fits all.

A legendary leader in biotech, I respect and admire how he has shaped the landscape in that field of tech. But when it comes to software development, he asks to see milestones, Gantt charts, and short and long-term measurable metrics. He comments that scrum is common sense that its ideologies existed long before the talk about it. He sees that I am doing project management and believes that in order to grow the company I need to reach the scope of enterprise management.

It pains me to bear his inquiries because I seem to have trouble answering him. There is direction, but it frequently changes. One thing he is right about is that I should pause and find a way to measure the progress made. There are many days where I feel like we are spinning around in a chaotically transient state. The product development cycle is so tight that there is a near infinite flexibility for pivoting, and our daily actions push us into yet a different bearing. It’s feels like brownian motion.

The software tech industry hovers around a reaction-based market, so naturally things change quickly and drastically. Unlike the biotech industry, the software tech has no FDA clearance delays, no supply chain strategizing, no heavy upfront investment capital needs, and therefore no tolerance for time lost. A booming software tech firm with a setback today could be an underdog by tomorrow morning. There are virtually no barriers to entry outside a small team with skills and a set of laptops in a coffee shop. This creates a perfectly competitive market with a short circuit for product development whose resistance is defined by the team’s performance and early-adopter feedback. There is an idea, the team builds it. It is tested with early adopters as soon as possible. What is learned is used to build again.

Technology now accelerates at a nonlinear rate, losing those who are not building for tomorrow. A generation of entrepreneurs (e-gen) is significantly shorter than that of a social generation. Instead of 20 years, the entrepreneurial lifecycle has now reached 4 years due to how large and accessible the internet has made the tech market. What this means is that an entrepreneur’s ideas today, if not embraced by society before the end of the current e-gen, will become obsolete and (s)he will need to entirely reinvent themselves and adapt to the next shift in thinking in order to stay relevant. This is the risk that a tech entrepreneur faces in software that (s)he does not face in biotech.

The disagreements between my mentor and I lie in the fact that we are from different e-gens as well as tech fields. Things just happen a lot faster in software than in any other area of business. As the convolution of both fields begins to unravel, I think that our differences will converge and we might see things from a similar lens once again.