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Great comment, curious to hear more about your perspective. > The problems became immediately apparent when we lacked the organizational authority to actually
by highfrequency 2y ago
Great comment, curious to hear more about your perspective.
> The problems became immediately apparent when we lacked the organizational authority to actually get important things done. We could write the software, but we needed the VP and CTO to actually use their positions in meetings to get agreement from other departments about the important cross-organizational factors of getting software implemented and adopted.
Would it be fair to diagnose this as an issue where the tech side of the business ran in an open, proactive way but other departments had a top-down mentality that required interfacing with the head of your department?
In other words - do you think it is a necessary/desirable feature that ICs need organizational authority from the CTO to push major changes? I get that given how the rest of the org functioned, it would have been much better to have more top-down mentality from the CTO. But is there a better equilibrium where this is not required?
- eapressoandcats 2y agoThe reality is that no matter how much you decide to push authority down, at some point there will be conflicting decisions and you need to resolve that. Most organizations lean escalation upwards eventually to the CEO to resolve disputes. If tech is trying to make changes that impact another major business area, and chaos needs to be avoided, then if you want to avoid executives being involved then members of that org need to be empowered to agree on those changes. However if you do that without structure it’s easy to just end up with organizational chaos as you wind up massively multiplying the communication channels that need to be pushed lower in the org. Someone needs to limit and direct the people responsible for those decisions if they’re not going to make them themselves.