Project Management's Guide to Baking: Just Start on the Icing
Description
A screenshot of a chat conversation between 'PM' and 'John' that uses a cake-baking analogy to illustrate a common software development problem. The PM asks for a cake, and John explains they need to wait for ingredients. The PM then insists John start on the icing even though most ingredients haven't arrived. John warns the icing will spoil, but the PM overrules him, demanding he 'start on the icing anyways.' The conversation is a metaphor for a project manager pressuring a developer to start on a feature (the 'icing,' often the UI) before the necessary backend infrastructure or dependencies (the 'ingredients') are in place. This highlights a classic conflict where non-technical managers, focused on visible progress, ignore technical constraints, leading to wasted work and developer frustration
Comments
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You can't ice a promise. Well, you can, but then you just have a sticky mess assigned to you in a Jira ticket
PM keeps demanding we “work on the icing,” so I spun up an empty repo called frosting-service, set its health check to always return 200, and marked the project green - should buy us two sprints before anyone realizes there’s still no cake microservice
After 20 years in this industry, I've learned that "I need you to start on the icing anyway" is just PM-speak for "I already promised the customer they could lick the bowl at tomorrow's demo."
This is the software equivalent of a PM asking you to deploy the frontend before the API exists, then wondering why users see 404s everywhere. 'Just mock the responses!' they say, as if production users will be satisfied with Lorem Ipsum data. The real kicker? Eight days later, they're still demanding you start on the icing - because surely by now you've figured out how to make frosting defy the laws of thermodynamics and project dependencies
WaterScrumFall in one message: “Start on the icing” = build the UI while the API, schema, and contracts are TBD; mark it 80% done and 200% rework later
PO demanding the icing sprint before backend ingredients? That's deploying React polish on a 404 cake - shiny prod crashes incoming
Frosting-driven development: polish the demo while the dependency graph still has no cake node - looks great in sprint review, guaranteed rework in prod