Comment by simonh
2 years ago
I’d not heard that about Netflix before but it makes a lot of sense. The Apple case is an interesting counterpoint though. They seem to have a pretty solid culture of consensus and collaboration between teams at the top. But then they have an unusual functional organisation structure rather than being organised around product divisions. This means the functional teams have a stake in (basically) all the products, so don’t have as much of an incentive to play favourites. It’s just a different approach to addressing the same issue.
> The Apple case is an interesting counterpoint though
Isn't the story that iphone development was a secret project with competing teams, one of which proposed the touch-screen interface?
That’s true, but only for very early prototypes. Once the decision had been made which to go with, that was it. Yes the iPhone team was isolated, that’s not unusual for a stealth project at Apple, but the iPhone software team still reported to the head of the Software org who also ran the Mac software team for example, the iPhone hardware guys still reported to the head of the hardware org responsible for Mac hardware as well.
There was no real separate Mac product team from the iPhone team, the head of hardware was responsible for the hardware for both so he didn’t have a conflict of interest. Whichever succeeded, to whatever degree, he would succeed. He would have no incentive for either to fail or to spike one in favour of the other.
...and what about the whole story of Jobs' return to the company?
Ah yes I remember it being made a big thing of, like it was revolutionary or something, when I joined - however in the UK we'd understood functional vs product and indeed matrix management since forever. Welcome to the 1970s theme park that is the US I guess!