EP108 Why Product Teams Slow Down as Companies Scale — And What to Do About It

Jürgen, before we get into some of the specifics around losing speed, I'm keen to firstly know why is this such a passion pain point for you? Why do you enjoy looking at this problem space of why companies lose speed?

Yeah, very good question.

So when I started my career, I started in a small startup-like company locally here in Germany.

They were inventing and producing hardware and software for a very specific market.

Initially to finance my studies at university and later on I stayed at the company for almost 12 years.

the company grew right and what we had when we started we were around i would say just shy of 30 people when when i first joined the company you know everything was very agile and naturally right so we would exchange viewpoints you would have sales marketing software engineers all being together So and that made conversations quite easy and everybody was on the same page automatically.

And, you know, not only information flew naturally around, but also decision making appeared to be natural because, you know, things were discussed.

Everybody could come up with an idea.

And then it was discussed amongst different subject matter experts.

And then we came to a conclusion and that felt more natural.

So when I saw that company growing, I saw, as you said, I saw it to become slower.

So new management practices were put in place.

And you could see the distance between the different functions in the organization were, it was simply growing between sales, marketing, product management, development, and, you know, it, a classical hierarchical structure was, was implemented.

And this is where I see it so often die.

And, you know, Then after leaving that company, I worked for some of the largest tech companies such as Oracle and OpenText.

And what I saw again was I worked mainly in middle management or upper management.

And I saw the same thing.

So what was supposed to be a matrix organization in reality was, as in many companies, a classical command and control siloed organization.

So information wouldn't flow really.

instead of trusting the people and asking people what they think, information was limited and decision was ultimately made at the top.

And there was no real working together.

And it was the opposite, you know, there were KPIs for specific functions.

And, you know, nobody was tracked against the overall progress or the overall good of the company.

So you would find the development team just measured on, you know, outputs in their area.

Then you would have the sales team just being measured on, you know, how many deals do you close? What's your forecast accuracy? It didn't seem like one whole company or unit.