Jade Rubick on Single-Threaded Owners

Jade Rubick has an interesting experience report about the Single-Threaded Owner model of organization on his blog.

I often saw issues where the engineering manager (EM) and product manager (PM) didn’t work well together, and these teams tended to do quite poorly. Generally what would happen is their managers would attempt to “coach them through it”, but what would happen in practice is that those teams would just not work effectively for six months or more.

The Single-Threaded Owner (STO) model resolves these problems by creating cross-functional teams, composed of engineering, product, and design, with a single leader.

My favorite part is the story of the successful STO team. It sounds a lot like what I see from fluent Optimizing zone teams:

They were more strategically aligned than most any local team I’ve worked with...

They took greater ownership of their domain and began challenging some of the product direction they were “given”. They successfully pivoted the team’s direction to something they thought more important...

The team became incredibly productive and incremental, to the point that they started delivering things to customers every couple of weeks...

They would often learn new information from customers and make a small 1-2 week project that would start the next week...

It wasn’t all smiles and roses, though. Jade ran into substantial resistance. The whole experience report is worth reading. Check it out here.

If you liked this entry, check out my best writing and presentations, and consider subscribing to updates by email or RSS.