However, I would argue that the level of skill of any individual employee is made irrelevant inside big companies.
If Google pays 3X salary to get the best designer in the industry, it's completely wasted, because this person will be hamstrung by the much more powerful forces of bureaucracy and design debt.
If you place that same person high enough up in the org chart that they have power to make decisions...then they can't design anything amazing because they're just another manager attending meetings all day and not designing.
It's a catch-22. Hence why companies commoditize labor into pay bands.
You might as well just hire modestly above-average people at modestly above-average salaries who are easy-going and get along with their peers without drama. This is basically what most company interview processes are optimized for.
My experience is to manage people effectively, and apply just enough process for each person and job.
Eventually, some nimble whippersnapping startup who only hires "A players" eats the large enterprise's breakfast. But to satisfy the shareholders, the startup takes on more work and to cope with that work, they start hiring B players... and so it goes on the enterprise merrygoround.
There's no real solution, just different ways of playing the game.
Sounds like you have a decent lightweight process-making-and-revising process. Most organizations don't. Instead, most organizations create processes mostly ad-hoc in reaction to some trauma, and then never remove them. It accumulates, like scar tissue that only ever gets thicker unless it is ripped away, which just causes different scars.
>As companies get larger and more complex, there’s a tendency to manage to proxies. This comes in many shapes and sizes, and it’s dangerous, subtle, and very Day 2.
A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right. Gulp. It’s not that rare to hear a junior leader defend a bad outcome with something like, “Well, we followed the process.” A more experienced leader will use it as an opportunity to investigate and improve the process. The process is not the thing.
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/2016-letter-to...
I'd guess that it'd work better with a better-than-good-enough Benevolent Dictator who gets to improve the user interface however s/he wants,
than to go looking for the "magic" UX improvement process
> mandate
The problem with mandatory processes is that people don’t take responsibility for the outcome of a process over which they have no power. Processes should be tools people can pick up to improve clarity.
I wish HN had a 'follow' feature...
Anyway, thanks for your quality comments.
Arguments over features basically yield to whoever has the most soft power, which is they you see the C suite so invested in the outcome of various features... it's literally theirs.
Not completely wasted. At least they made sure the best designer is not working for a possible competitor.
There are exactly zero good product/project managers out there. There are some really nice and good and capable and kind and talented people who have this label attached to them. There are some good product/project clerks. There are some good product/project directors. There are some good product/project evangelists. But no good product/project manager. The term is a pariah on the well being of teams and productivity and delivering the right product to the right people. Many peers have been placed in this position over the years, in every case, they've become less likable people because of it and we're no longer a net positive collaboration. In every case, they themselves were less happy and felt less about themselves over time.
Maybe some of you have experienced a good product/project manager (who wasn't really just masquerading as some other responsibility), but I stand by my assertion. My sampling of this "position" remains at zero good ones.
What would it take to change your mind?
Most first class work out in the world was not produced by teams of only extraordinarily talented individuals. Most of it is done by fairly regular teams who take the care and attention to do good work.
What you're describing is an extraordinary team composed of regular individuals.
Because as they get bigger and hire more employees you inevitably move back towards the mean. There are only so many good designers and good PMs out there.