Real estate ads are drenched in a kind of marketing lingo that makes flaws sound good. You quickly learn to decode this doublespeak when you're on the market for a new house.
A "cozy" apartment doesn't mean there's a fireplace. It means it's small.
"Charming, rustic elements" indicate a fixer-upper, and "unique" just means there's something weird about the floor plan.
The real estate agent isn't flat-out lying here. These euphemisms are a way to frame a negative as a positive.
The corporate world is also rife with doublespeak aimed at attracting talent.
A "young, dynamic company" doesn't pay well. That's why all the experienced people leave.
A "fast-paced environment" has no plan and just races to build more stuff.
And then there is the "flat organization".
It's clear what a company tries to signal by claiming they are non-hierarchical.
“Come work for us; We're all peers here.”
That sounds like music to the ears of rebellious twenty-somethings. No bosses! I certainly remember being impressed at that age when I learned the CEO worked in the same open-plan office as the rest of us. Equality!
Unfortunately, the flat organization isn't a rank-free utopia. It's a smoke screen. Or rather: a muddled cloud of implicit hierarchies. And that's a terrible environment to get things done.
I remember working on a project for a large organization divided into multiple autonomous departments. What attracted my teammates and me was the ability to work in our own sphere of influence. We were told we could take ownership of an internal product. We interviewed, MVP'ed, and verified. We captured feedback from those teams that would need to use our API. We did it by the book.
When it was time to demo the first version of the API, I was introduced to a man I never met before. He was part of an Enterprise Architect Bureau and was tasked with standardizing the APIs across the entire organization. Of course, we were not compliant with this internal standard. We never heard of it!
Our project got shelved.
Months of work down the drain.
What a waste of resources.
This is not a one-off experience. I have multiple stories of well-managed products that suddenly run into a stakeholder-ex-machina. An extra cook suddenly appears in the kitchen and changes the menu.
It's clear to see where this went wrong. Flat organizations draw no boundaries for responsibilities and don't have explicit hierarchies. That doesn't mean there aren't any. The Enterprise Architects obviously ranked higher on the non-existing hierarchy. That would not have been a show-stopper. But we didn't know they existed, and they didn't know what we were working on.
That's the price to pay for refusing to write down the organization's true hierarchy. Everybody gets to do what they want until two spheres of influence collide.
This problem isn't limited to multi-national enterprises. While the waste will be larger in huge organizations, the impact will be bigger in small companies.
I firmly believe Engineering, not Product, should own the roadmap. When I write about that on social media, there's a recurring type of comment. Without fail, people will chime in to say that both departments should just collaborate on the roadmap. They should both own it. That just feels more "egalitarian", I guess.
But it's a mistaken fantasy of a non-hierarchical organization, and it leads to conflict. I promise there's an implicit hierarchy; given time, someone will pull rank. If you ever had to drop your sprint plan because Sales promised an urgent feature, you know what I mean.
Organizations need hierarchy. That doesn't mean we need a matrix organization where everyone has seven bosses. It does mean we need to have clear documentation of the responsibilities and the chains of command.
Who reports to who?
Who owns which (part of a) product?
Who is responsible for cross-cutting concerns like security and architecture?
Large organizations might need RACI matrices and elaborate organigrams. Small companies can get away with clever team design.
But all businesses need to make their structure explicit.
Agreed, owned by committee rarely produces the best results.