Quim, thanks for writing that. I am happy about the conversations that are happening about this, and I'm finding people's thoughts and input useful. There have been (and are being) lots of face-to-face conversations as well as the ones on the lists and in other venues: it's all good.
There is of course no perfect ideal solution --it's a balancing-act among multiple considerations-- and there is zero likelihood that we'll come up with a result that is understandable for everyone, and fits their ideal version of how the org should work. That's okay: we don't need to be perfect (and there is no "perfect") --- we just need to be always evolving-towards-better, as the org grows and changes. I'm glad Erik kicked this off with a request for input: the input is useful :-)
Thanks, Sue On Nov 9, 2012 11:05 AM, "Quim Gil" quimgil@gmail.com wrote:
Thank you for the explanations.
On 11/07/2012 11:47 AM, Terry Chay wrote:
It turns out we use a lot of industry terminology, without realizing that we are poorly communicating what that means to most people.
Actually I'm familiar with industry terminology, and also with the wrong assumptions and prejudices it carries many times. I know *you* get it right but a basic goal of any reorg is that *everybody* gets it right now and in the future.
While it makes total sense to organize Product Management, Design and Analytics under "Product Development", it feels old school and odd to leave out the software engineers fully dedicated to product development. It enforces the old vision that software development is something that comes apart and after the product definition. But being Erik (a software developer himself) the proposed VP in that area I don't need to insist in this point.
The current proposal of having software developers working on products (Language, Mobile, Platform...) together with Operations (sysadmins, not directly involved in product development) feels just as old school and odd. The common denominator seems to be "teams that know to code", "the command line dudes", etc. I might be mistaken, but it feels as consistent as a VP of Presentations overseeing Marketing, Analytics, Design and other teams with high communications skills and able to produce great slides. :)
And whoever leads the proposed "Engineering" team still would need to deal at a high level with two very different agendas: those from teams actually developing software features and those from the operations teams, the latter probably still complaining that they don't get as much attention at the top level.
So...
If the goals are "narrowing focus" + "scale the dept, and take seriously our identity as a tech org (as stated by Sue)" (Erik says) then why not flattening more all this tech structure?
Something like
- Product Management.
- Design.
- Software development.
-- Features -- MediaWiki. -- Language. -- Mobile.
- Operations.
- Analytics.
This would mean 5 tech managers (already leading their teams) where now you have Erik alone, 4 of them focused on product development + Operations. Erik himself could act as EVP overseeing the product development activities, since this is the narrowed focus now. He should focus on vision, strategy and glue between the tech teams and with the rest of WMF. The reporting and leadership of each team would be done by those 5 managers, now interacting with Sue & "non-tech managers" more often.
Doesn't this sound like a more flat and scalable org, with a clearer tech org identity?
PS: yes, it's easy for an outsider to shuffle proposals without much background and knowledge of the day to day. :) But since you asked for feedback... I hope it's useful, regardless of what you decide at the end. Thank you for listening!
-- Quim
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