| This was mid to late 90s. I don't know if execution would apply today. But the notions of designing the organization are evergreen. I riffed on a notion from Ford's idea of quality circles, where engr, mfg, and QA made decisions jointly. And the USA Constitution's notion of balance of powers (trilemma). My company was engineering driven. Our releases were always late. Way too many defects. QA/Test were demoralized. Sales and marketing weren't even part of the convo. So I split responsibilities into three roles. Marketing determined feature set and price point. Engineering determined how and schedule. QA/Test controlled the release. The first release cycle was VERY HARD. People hate change. I was an asshole and burned a lot of goodwill. Thereafter, our releases were always on time, we hit our P&L numbers, reduced our costs (eg tech support burden), and were given ever increasing amount of responsibility. Later, I expanded the organizational triangle into a star by adding tech support, sales, and writing roles, each with their own responsibilities and authority. We survived Y2K just fine. But 9/11 crashed our industry and we didn't survive not having customers. |