3 ms·

perhaps you should not hire developers but people who will own a whole "vertical slice" i.e. do what typically is sliced horizontally between business - product

• wpietri 11y ago
  I like the spirit of this, in that I personally enjoy working some in other areas. Plus, I think dividing out work like "analyst" and "architect" can be super dangerous: it shifts individual focus from project success to looking like an awesome producer of architecture documents or analysis documents. On the other hand, I think the model you suggest would also be problematic because on a project of any size you need to glue back together a lot of very thin slices. It adds the problem that no one person is going to be amazing at all those things, so a fair bit of important work will get done poorly. I think the best model is instead cross-functional, closely collaborating teams where the decision about who does what is extremely fluid. That gets the benefit of lots of people doing (and understanding) different sorts of work. But it lets key work be done by people with strong expertise. Real-world examples of this include IDEO's pursuit of "T-shaped" people: http://chiefexecutive.net/ideo-ceo-tim-brown-t-shaped-stars-the-backbone-of-ideoae%E2%84%A2s-collaborative-culture/ http://chiefexecutive.net/ideo-ceo-tim-brown-t-shaped-stars-... And Atomic Object's use of "poly-skilled, co-located teams of generalists": http://spin.atomicobject.com/2011/09/16/poly-skilled-teams-deliver-products/ http://spin.atomicobject.com/2011/09/16/poly-skilled-teams-d...