[hipppocamp]

> I think it’s often better to divide up the product over many separate small teams, each with a product focused “mini CEO” and a tech focused “mini CTO”.

This only gets you so far. It tends to optimize for speed of teams but at the detriment of the overall product.

Eventually you end up with splintering of ideas, terminology, duplicate functionality and features that almost work the same way. You see it across all big companies and products. AWS is a great example of the mess they've made between services and how they don't always play well together and you end up with teams actually competing as they assert that their product should own something that's others shouldn't. I wouldn't be surprised if Google is in the same mess (Drive is a fucking cluster of a mess and it's basically impossible to use for anything productivity related - and don't get me started on how Google Classroom works within that ecosystem that's a double yikes). Same goes for Atlassian. What's the saying? Don't ship your org chart?

[AndreasHae]

Can you think of any FAANG scale orgs that haven’t run into having a fragmented product landscape? Maybe there’s just a hard limit of how much complexity one business unit can handle before it stops being able to scale up. With that in mind, decentralized teams with tight product+tech collaboration seem to be a successful model. Otherwise we would probably already have seen an example of a successful tech company with centralized product/tech departments.

[Jare]

The fragmentation issues doesn't need FAANG scale, and is already a possibility for any org that scales past 50 people or so. If a team has the potential to interfere with another, or the need to depend on another, you already have the primordial soup for conflict and widening cracks.

[kcexn]

Isn't Apple very successful with centralised product/tech departments?

[hipppocamp]

I was wondering the same thing. I suspect that Apple has a strong top-down culture that's been set by Steve Jobs, so you likely have a "single-threaded owner" model, regardless of how the org chart really looks. Companies that rely on more distributed models where you have peers that have final say over their product decisions end up with splintering and features that don't align well.