First, they fired all of the project managers. I don’t know what the reasoning was on that one. It didn’t last very long. As soon as it was clear that releases were going nowhere, they hired new ones.
Then, that same company had the brilliant idea to fire all the product managers. Because the product was a platform for engineers, so the engineers could do the product management work, right?
Wrong. The engineers were not keen on spending all day on the phones talking to customers to figure out what they needed.
And guess what? There were loads of use cases, all different. So if the engineers created a platform that worked for our little startup, it wouldn’t satisfy a quarter of what was needed by the enterprise customers.
Then they bought a company half a world away, and decided all the senior engineers should be turned into managers. Within months most of them hated their job, having to manage team members locally and 12 hours away, not getting any time to write code or build the product.
Most of them reverted to not being managers within a few months.
They decided not to invest much in UX, and had the engineers brand the site where they published the open source projects that came out of the company. It was pretty terrible to look at.
But this was a great company to work in. I actually loved working there.
Even though they tried all these things, they also realized when those experiments failed, and then did something different.
They hired the project managers. They hired the product managers. They hired actual engineering managers who wanted to be managers. They got great UX folks. They learned.
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