| In our organization we created a special "department" which is disconnected from the traditional corporate structure. We're a compound of self-organized teams of Product Owners and Engineers. Our traditional organization takes 10 weeks for feature X, we need at most 2 weeks, averaging at 1 week (10%). We have the luxury of delivering the exact same product (as a green-field variant of our classical product as a SaaS solution), so it´s quite comparable in terms of scope. The main difference is there is no hidden agenda of would-be managers, nothing between the customer than a PO who knows what he is doing (i.e. is doing regular A/B tests, customer interviews, involving the dev team as deep as possible to understand customer requirements). We were awarded a nation-wide award for digital transformation. No middle-managers, no HR. You can reach me @ hackernews@disposable-email.ml for additional details if you like. Summarizing: we got rid of all non-relevant management ballast and are able to deliver features at a pace of around 10x of a traditionally managed line. Overtime: around 0% with a tendency to dip below 0%. Addendum: the POs are 70% MBAs, but they are good (i.e. they learnt to deliver as opposed to manage) |
My experience is that these lean approaches work well for something low on the severity scale, like an SaaS solution, but can more easily falter with complex safety-critical systems that blend multiple domains (e.g., mechanical, software, etc.) I think sometimes people interpret the process rigor that gets added to critical design to management bloat.