I used to work for a small-ish Dutch energy company, and they went to a great effort at implementing this kind of framework, I thought it was great. We basically had huge quarterly roadmaps pasted onto one big wall of the office, and you would frequently see the product, marketing, sales and C-level people stood there discussing and prioritising. The transparency here meant anyone could wander up and see what the strategy was for the quarter and therefore what would be prioritised. It was sometimes gloriously messy but you really felt included and incentivised to work towards the company's common goals. Wish everyone did this.
It's so blunt that it's great, the business dudes are so adept at optimization while ignoring externalities.
"These poor souls are lost without jobs, we can't ignore their plight!"
It seemed he liked working at FB but he mentioned several times how your impact is your tracked metric and if you didn't have impact then who cares what you're doing.
I think it can be flawed because if your team doesn't like you and youre a Data Scientist? Well now they aren't going to listen to your compelling data and your impact is a 0. Or if they have some other motive, it could even be one person with power on your team!
Obviously I'm describing the worst, but it seems a flawed system.
If critical business functions depend on a piece of software maintained by one person, the organization has a problem.
If you decide to become dependent on a piece of software, that software better be well documented, tested, audited and maintained by a group of people with certain level of redundancy in case one of them is not available or leaves the organization.
If you have 100 employees, from which each one of them is working on some critical piece of software that nobody fully understand, eventually you get a death spiral of orphaned projects.
There, engineers’ promotions and perf used to be heavily dependent on their impact. Developers needed to be aware what the business impact of their work was, thus they needed to measure (using the excellent tooling available).
This model worked very well while the company was growing. Lots of features core to Facebook today were created by engineers, not product managers. Newsfeed. GraphQL. A/B testing frameworks.
The difficulty comes both when growth slows - and it’s hard to have impact without cannibalising another team’s impact - as well as when having more impact actually causes harm to the company on a different direction. While engineers were optimising for engagement, tweaking the news feed algorithm to show items you were likely to click on, sensationalist content (sometimes: fake news) was over-promoted. While the ads team optimised for ad engagement by exposing various metrics, they exposed metrics that turned to public uproar later on.
The idea of only optimising for impact is a great short-term strategy. Long-term it is not nearly as black-and-white.
My take is the optimum is in-between. Engineers should have an understanding and input on the business impact. But the strategy and prioritisation framework does need to come top-down, aligned with the long-term goals of the business.