6 ms·

I don't get it. Too much time is spent coordinating, so fire those who are responsible for coordination? Am I reading this wrong?

• jerjerjer 14d ago
  People whose primary job is to "coordinate" often, either in a well-meaning attempt to be thorough or just to be relevant, try to pull as many different people into any decision-making as possible. So instead of me just getting approval from my manager, I need to get approval/buy-in from departments A, B, and C. In that case, firing the "coordinator" person increases velocity because parts of the business processes they prop disappear.
  • deleted 14d ago
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  • locknitpicker 13d ago
    > In that case, firing the "coordinator" person increases velocity because parts of the business processes they prop disappear. So you get rid of the coordinator. What then? Does this magically unblock people? Let me frame this differently: if coordinating teams creates as much problems and impedance as you claim, how come Uber hired them to begin with? I mean, either Uber was shooting itself in the foot then, or it is now. Which one is it?
    • jerjerjer 13d ago
      > Does this magically unblock people? Yes? Removing and/or minimizing detractors/hangers-ons/randoms from a project is an important part of running a project. Especially in corporate scenarios where telling people to go pound sand is, unfortunately, not an option, more elaborate strategies must be employed. > If coordinating teams creates as much problems and impedance as you claim, how come Uber hired them to begin with? I mean, either Uber was shooting itself in the foot then, or it is now. Which one is it? Are you thinking that humans can predict behavior and evolution of social systems, and especially how they would behave after some change is forced upon them? In my opinion, that cannot be further from the truth. Any sufficiently complex social system, which Uber with 30k+ employees definitely is, exists and evolves more or less independently from how any one individual part of this system might wish. Even if it's a CEO. Uber leadership thought cross-team coordination would help them, so they hired a bunch of people to do it. That might have been a correct idea at a time, or at least on paper, it looked like a correct move. But in the end, it did not pan out. So they probably shot themselves in the foot back then. Did they shoot themselves in the foot now? Who knows? (Spoiler: no one) We'll see once enough time has passed.
• csande17 14d ago
  There were too many meetings, so they got rid of the people whose jobs were to create lots of meetings.
• etse 14d ago
  That's how I read it, too. They pinpointed the problem of over-coordination to the messenger (coordinator) instead of the teams demanding final approval over launches (coordination). Won't merging different teams under a single owner only push the problem further down the org chart?
  • icepush 14d ago
    The thinking in these types of reorgs is typically to push it so far down the chart that it comes out the other side
• MattGaiser 14d ago
  The coordinators enable extra coordination that is not worth doing. The coordination itself is the problem.