A rather long time ago I was in a meeting with a fairly senior development director and we were talking about annual roadmap planning. He was complaining about things. One of the things he brought up several times was race horses. He kept saying –
Bob, we simply don’t have enough race horses.
I became confused and a bit frustrated and I sort of lashed out saying –
What do race horses have to do with us meeting our software product goals for next year?
He said – no Bob, I’m talking about resources, not race horses.
After all these years, I still find this story both amusing and troubling at the same time. I think we often overuse the term resources as leaders, managers and project managers in software discussions.