|
From my past experience, when an org could not build what people wanted, there were usually (i.e. almost always) specific reasons why. The things I’ve seen have included: inability of product to capitalize on ideas that did not come from them, directors who blocked/stifled work at odds with their interests (i.e. empire building), culture that was good at one thing (and not the other things they needed to succeed), absolutely psycho top management resulting in fear throughout the org, engineers who cared more about technical thing X than shipping product, management that did not grasp the technical aspects enough to manage the engineering effort, management that is simply spiteful and shoots itself in the foot, toxic culture that spends more time on intra-company competition than actual work. Funny thing is, I think I can pin the problem on the rank-and-file at just one company. The reality is that most of the front-line just do whatever they’re told. When you have e.g. toxic culture, that comes from top down, or is at least given a free pass by the folks at the top. There will be rare exceptions here and there. I’ve seen a company that made something that people wanted, but they simply did not have the marketing, money, and focus to acquire enough users to break even, and lost to a competitor that had an inferior product but went gonzo on their marketing. But maybe you could say that that was a fault of marketing, product, and senior leadership, not the org making the product. So anyway, my retort is that if you do not know what exactly is broken in your org, then you have bleeped up royally. There is practically always a very specific reason, and you don’t address a specific problem with a blind sledgehammer. |