The original deck included a lot of builds, which made some of the reasoning clearer

1. The role of the manager in
modern tech organizations
Stretch, Budapest, December 6, 2013
Andreas Ehn <ehn@wrapp.com>

4. TV Commercials
Internet ads
Mobile banners
In the 1950s, people read
radio ads aloud on television
In the 1990s, people launched
static newspaper ads online
Today, we put website
banners on mobile phones
Give free & paid gifts
Claim promotions
Discover & follow brands
Get updates

5. 2.32 million users
27 million vouchers!
claimed/shared
2.34 million vouchers!
used in stores

7. CEO
VP
Prod
Team
Dev
lead
CTO
VP
Eng
Chief
architect
Dev
Dev
Designer

8. CTO!
VP Engineering!
• An architect, a thinker, a researcher, a
tester and a tinkerer!
• Runs the engineering team on a dayto-day basis!
• “Usually can’t manage their way out of
a paper bag, but have huge vision, the
ability to pull an all-nighter and crank
out a rough prototype, have the unique
ability to translate complex/abstract
thoughts into simple English for a nontechnical end-user, and a willingness to
get up in front of 1,000 people and talk
about the latest greatest thing they are
working on/thinking about”!
• Process/management gods (and
goddesses)!
• Totally focused on building and
shipping products!
• Should have an engineering
background, but isn’t necessarily the
strongest tech person on the team
• Happy to work collaboratively with the
VP Engineering while leaving the
engineering team completely alone
Fred Wilson: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/10/vp-engineering-vs-cto.html!
Brad Feld: http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2007/10/cto-vs-vp-engineering.html

9. CEO
VP
Prod
Team
Dev
lead
CTO
VP
Eng
Chief
architect
Dev
Dev
Designer

10. Communication
Prioritization

11. The traditional manager
•
Makes most decisions by him-/
herself
•
Over-specifies
•
Tells you what to do in detail
•
Tells you when it should be
done or, at best, requires you to
say when it will be done

12. The problem
•
Generalists without a lot of
domain knowledge make most
decisions
•
Little room for experimentation
•
No validation of different
options against real data
•
Communication is highly
directed and often inefficiently
routed

13. What to do instead?
•
Decentralize
•
Enable and empower

14. Decentralize
•
Push decisions
“downwards”
•
Empower individuals
and small teams to
make decisions and
build end-to-end
features
•
At the most, decide on
what, never how

15. Enable and empower
•
Be a problem solver,
remove blockers
•
Channel communication
with other parts of the
organization

16. Problems (and solutions)
•
Expectations – very important to
manage expectations for the
rest of the organization
•
Consistency – have architect
and UX roles that span across
teams
•
Focus – clearly define, explain
and argue for the company
vision; convince rather than
force
•
Stay the course on the vision,
but experiment on the
implementation

17. Minimum viable features
•
Experimentation is only
feasible if tested/
validated against reality
frequently
•
Short iterations; well
defined, testable goals
•
Readjust course quickly
•
Easier to keep the rest
of the org up to speed

18. Avoiding getting stuck in a
local maximum
•
How do you avoid
limiting yourself to a hillclimbing approach that
risks getting stuck in a
local maximum?
•
Allow for a bit of
craziness – injecting
randomness into the
system

19. Hacking
•
Hack days, hack
weeks, 20% time
•
Maybe all the time
should be for hacking?

20. Is anyone really doing this?

22. Haier without middle
management
•
Now Zhang Ruimin, who turned the
company into its current success, has
eliminated the firm’s entire middle
management
•
“In the past, employees waited to
hear from the boss; now, they listen to
the customer.”
•
The firm’s 80,000 employees are now
organized into 2,000 zi zhu jing ying ti
(ZZJYTs): self-managed teams that
perform many different roles. Each is
responsible for profit and loss, and
individuals are paid on performance
•
“An unsteady and dynamic
environment is the best way to keep
everyone flexible.”

23. CERN
•
Goals are well defined (find the
Higgs boson), but not the way
to get there; individual design
decisions are put off for as
long as possible, which lets
the project “absorb
uncertainty”
•
Teams with rival proposals
spar publicly, forcing all the
boffins to articulate their
assumptions, justify their
choices and learn enough
about their rivals’ ideas to
criticize them at length

24. But…
•
Is it easier for companies
that have a perfect fit
between what developers
and customers want
(GitHub, Valve) than for
companies building for a
different audience
(Stardoll, Wrapp)?
•
How to achieve product–
market fit? VP Product as
translator?

26. Thank you!
Andreas Ehn
ehn@wrapp.com
@ehn