202410300657 unraveling complexity in product development ft. john cutler
"Someone had a great model the other day, they called kebab orgs and cake orgs. A kebab org is like a kebab is the journey, you know, like a journey based teams and a cake is... you've got these layers..."
The kebab represents teams organized around customer journeys (vertical slices), while the cake represents traditional layered organizational structures (horizontal layers).
"Healthy tension works when conditions are generally healthy, but when the shit's hitting the fan, healthy tension becomes highly unhealthy tension."
"Don't assume right now that everyone is a malicious actor. There's just... a lot of fog."
"All the org design stuff happening in engineering now, trying to sort of refactor the orgs so they can move faster and be more customer-centric, that will ultimately define a lot of the ways design works and can work and how quickly you can ship and how fast you can learn and the feedback loops in your company."
"In the next 10 years, you're going to see the following model emerge in some companies. There will be groups of 30 to 50 people with one product manager, one sort of design lead for the whole group. A pod of insights. Insights will include UX research, quantitative, quant, qual, analytics, data science."
"I think 30 to 50 people is probably the maximum boundary of contained trust you can have in a pseudo remote world"
"There's some acknowledgement now that having a bunch of junior PMs running around the org doesn't help the teams, doesn't help designers. That, like, one senior or staff or more experienced PM can drive the coherence necessary for a lot more people than just six people."
"There's three fundamental model types. There's capability model types, journey model types, and flywheel or business model type flywheel types."
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