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.
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.