[Kynlyn]

I think it's a worthwhile goal to attempt to achieve this in other companies, but it's also important to truly understand why this works so well at GitHub.

GitHub is largely developers writing software for other developers. An interesting problem to a GitHubber is just as likely to be something that their customers are interested in. GitHub is a classic example of dog-fooding. They use their own product and many of their employees used the product before they came to work there. A typical developer at Github is very likely to have the same vision (and passion!) for the product as the owners of GitHub.

If your product is software for a vertical that doesn't happen to be other developers then are going to be likely challenges. What is interesting to the developers very well might not be interesting to their customers.