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054 Ownership by Team and PO
Lancer: Dhaval Panchal starts the discussion about teams and management.
Dhaval: In 2010 there was a need to have a mobile development team and a web development team. Now when responsiveness came into play, the need to have two kinds of focus areas went away, because technology allowed them to take care of rendering into different kinds of devices, but that technology would have never come until the problem in the first place. So it’s almost like, you know, taking two steps forward, one step backward, and then some technology allows you to move a little bit ahead. Right? So when you look at the question of “what does scaling mean?” To me it means, “can we build the tools that actually help us to get better?” As opposed to “how can I find a lot of work for all the people?”
There will always be new technology that is going to make what you were completely obsolete. And if you have the capability to build your own tools, to build your own improvement by building your own tools, then you’re not dependent on an external agent to come sell you that tool.
Dhaval: There’s a lot of motivation for someone to build the technology tool to actually solves the problem.
Like for example, in one of the companies that I was working with did gaming design. The tool they were using to do design was an internal tool and that was the least funded effort in the entire organization when instead it should have been the largest funded effort because it saves the designers a tremendous amount of time. Instead the designers were making their own internal hacks and shortcuts to overcome the tool shortcoming and they were hiring more and more designers to cope with the fact that they have to do a lot of design. And that problem will never be solved by adding more people to the design department when the problem is you have really bad tools to do the work.
Lancer: Does scaling your organization well avoid that?
Bas: I guess you can generalize it as simply when you grow larger, gradually people take away more and more responsibility from the team. So you get less responsible teams. And the tools aspect is just just one of the symptoms.
Lancer: So if a teams are becoming less responsible than something else is stepping in to provide things. Um, so maybe we’re talking about those like, “hey, we’re going to h