Exactly Why Your Tech Organization Is Malfunctioning

This is where I convince you that fine-grained organization structure is the worst for tech evolution. It’s the ball and chain that’s dragging you and your teammates down. The CEO doesn’t see it, but you do.

How many people sit beside you? Digital workspace or butts in seats, it doesn’t matter. Your immediate team or pod is a tiny gear in the organization’s complicated drivetrain. Your responsibility is to deliver more torque to the wheels. How do you deliver more torque when you don’t oversee the driveshaft, nor the fuel tank, nor the critical transmission components?

You have a mandate, but the pod-based structure kills your attempts to build better tech at the organization level. I like to call this the organization-team conundrum. You’re trying to build a better vehicle, but your boss, and your boss’s boss, both have you doing oil changes.

While oil changes are a crucial part of the vehicle’s maintenance and daily functioning, they won’t make your family sedan go from 0 to 100 in under 3 seconds. You need to be perform the critical scheduled maintenance, while also taking part in those important discussions. These discussions need to occur in a time-efficient forum. They must also respect the schedules and time-zone constraints of hundreds of engineers. Not such an easy task, is it?

Companies usually attempt to solve this problem. Some use several of these and other methods:

1. Video calls at ungodly hours with 100 engineers from like timezones listening to one or two people monopolize the meeting.
2. Architectural design reviews that get forgotten about and don’t meet the eyes of even 10% of engineers in the organization.
3. Slack channels that can’t efficiently record decision-making results, let alone keep track of related tasks at the project-level.
4. Worse yet, private conversations that have 10 people working on the same company initiative keeping all learnings to themselves.

Believe it or not, I’ve seen all of these happen at once. All of these so-called methods of collaboration share the same fatal flaws:

1. Collaboration is weak, and the ability to reach consensus is severely limited.
2. Audit-ability is non-existent, leaving new and seasoned engineers wondering how and why important decisions were made.
3. Visibility of discussions is closely linked to the timezones that the participants operate in.

Software-engineering is engineering, and engineering is process-oriented. It doesn’t matter how agile or scrummy you are, decision-making is a key part of the engineering process. The engineering process is collaborative, and collaboration demands consensus to be effective. The decision-making process needs to be supported and nurtured in order to break though and not fall victim to lapses in communication. In tech, these lapses have proven deadly even for the most enlightened organizations.

These are exactly the problems we are fixing with Hydroplane. We allow engineers to collaborate and make decisions at light-speed, whether your team lives in one timezone, or is spread across the galaxy. You can subscribe on our site to be in the loop and receive an exclusive discount when we launch.