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As someone who have gone through this there is one Achilles heel: appraisals. Unless the management agrees in letter & spirit on prioritisation this is a disas

As someone who have gone through this there is one Achilles heel: appraisals. Unless the management agrees in letter & spirit on prioritisation this is a disaster. When everything is a priority the message from top is "We want best of both worlds" i.e. we want productivity, quality and less complaining. Now you have prioritized in seq: A B C D... The team who has C or D to deliver will have there deliverables pushed by say 6 months. Guess who will be pissed-off with this? But the team accountable for D will say that this is what was agreed and signed on but the top still had those flawed expectations back of their mind. There is also cross-team impact. The product manager who was championing project D now has his/her appraisal in question. He/She will point fingers to the engineering and complain to his/her boss. In other words: Every one in the chain of command has vested interest. Unless they are aligned to large extent its hard to get out of this situation.

goopthink 4y ago
This is a really valuable point and we faced a lot of ground-level resistance because of this. Teams and people were incentivized to care about the wrong things. Those things made sense in the past, but the structure and incentives of the engineering org did not keep up with the changing business needs. Again: not a knock on historic decisions (which made sense at the time), but a reflect of necessary change. Changing the incentive structure was implicit in the reorg we did and it was one of the most painful parts of the process. That said, the reorg allowed for more effective parallelization by making teams more independent, and thereby avoiding the "I'm sitting here and unable to get anything done" problem. But yes, if people are not in consensus, you'll have sabotage. The Lippit-Knoster model for managing complex change does a great job highlighting this.
xcambar 4y ago
The author seems well aware of that and wrote than all of this is only truly actionable if/when you're at a director-like level, and you can handle expectations from below and above.

goopthink 4y ago

This is a really valuable point and we faced a lot of ground-level resistance because of this. Teams and people were incentivized to care about the wrong things. Those things made sense in the past, but the structure and incentives of the engineering org did not keep up with the changing business needs. Again: not a knock on historic decisions (which made sense at the time), but a reflect of necessary change. Changing the incentive structure was implicit in the reorg we did and it was one of the most painful parts of the process. That said, the reorg allowed for more effective parallelization by making teams more independent, and thereby avoiding the "I'm sitting here and unable to get anything done" problem. But yes, if people are not in consensus, you'll have sabotage. The Lippit-Knoster model for managing complex change does a great job highlighting this.

xcambar 4y ago

The author seems well aware of that and wrote than all of this is only truly actionable if/when you're at a director-like level, and you can handle expectations from below and above.