This sounds to me exactly how Valve and other organizations operate (http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/valve-how-i-got-here-what-its-like-and-what-im-doing-

This sounds to me exactly how Valve and other organizations operate (http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/valve-how-i-got-here-what-its-like-and-what-im-doing-2/ http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/valve-how-i-got-here-w...). I think that if you get buy-in from the engineers working on the project it can induce ownership and a willingness to watch it succeed and work towards it's success. The issue occurs when there isn't adequate a/b testing (or something similar), which could create the fiasco such as facebook's switching of email addresses. Companies such as Google allow 20% time to work on projects that might not make it to production, or get killed after acquisitions. I think that policies such as those work better than code being committed on the fly.