Thread by @allenholub

This diagram has gottem me thinking about management structure. We all (at least /we/ all) agree that cross functional teams is best for development. However, that cross-functional, colaborative structure disappears up the organization, where VPs, etc., are not a team at all. 1/

So we have a situation where there's a collaborative executive team, collaborative execution teams, and everybody in the middle are separate individuals, often working at odds. I don't really see how that can work. In fact it doesn't work very well. 2/

We have a tension betwen any hierarchical structure, which is about giving orders and single people in control, and collaborative cross-functional teams. The only soln that makes sense to me is to go to collaborative cross-functional teams everywhere, even at mgmt levels. 3/

That leads naturally to more of a network model. That's not to say that there isn't direction. Pure networks (e.g. Holacracy) haven't worked very well. It does mean that we need collaboration, though, rather than force. 4/4

Just to amplify, What I'm proposing is a team that wouild effectively be a VPE, VP of Product, etc. that worked collaboratively with each other and that whole team would work with collaborative dev teams.