Comment by roenxi

If you can figure out how to turn the "should" in that sentence into "can" then you'll die wealthy. Tracking goals and turning them into a coherent strategy is a major unsolved problem in software engineering.

We accept best-effort from CTOs, but that leads to an industry that is a bit like a comet with a few success stories and a huge burning tail of leadership where they have limited to no ability to understand whether they are on track to achieve their goals and those goals don't come together into a coherent strategy. There is a strong argument that many of the success stories are only good relative to companies that failed even worse than they did and we all had to pick one of these bug-ridden software packages.

It is a lot like the era of the manufacturing industry before the statisticians moved in around WWII. We haven't managed a similar moment in software yet.