Hacker News Reader

Comment by vinceguidry | Hacker News Reader

I'll see your management issue and raise you a leadership one.

At my last job, a $40MM cosmetics and skincare company, the CEO had a great deal of trouble figuring out how to get his e-commerce department properly managed. I was willing to step up, and for a brief time they allowed me to bring in candidates for a position that would report to me, but I didn't have enough political cover over me so that fizzled out.

I cycled through 3 managers in 2 1/2 years at that job, 2 in the "Director of E-Commerce" role, and one in the "VP of E-Commerce" role. All three left for more sane roles.

It's hard to fix management problems at your company when leadership is so confused.

View on HN

I never thought about it, but "IT / development is crap in legacy industries" follows as a tautology from your perspective.

If the only way to effectively perform the job (in the broader, department sense) is with political cover.

And if political cover is only apportioned in a zero-sum game of high level positions.

And if there are legacy industries in which those positions are, and have been for decades, apportioned to predefined departments (notably standardized before the information revolution).

Then those legacy industries are going to have insufficient political cover over IT/development. And therefore terrible performance.

My current employer recently had a security epiphany, and they definitely empowered a reorganized security department to make necessary changes. But I'm sure there were many points where "VP of X" could have squashed a necessary security change, had security not been of equal seniority.

E-commerce is unique in that it has such a massive impact on revenue generation, but the skills needed to effectively manage it are rarely inline with the core competencies of the business.

Most companies attempt to tackle this problem in house, but without proper expertise, there is massive waste in hiring and poor execution. As a consultant, I’ve seen teams waste _years_ fumbling in this cycle, only for me to ship a product that immediately increases revenue in a fraction of the time. It generally only takes a few basic UI improvements and timing strategic automatic email tiggers.

Find a consultant that will make more from what you already have, and move on to your business problems. You don’t need to pivot into an internet company to be successful.

Hm. I get what you're saying, but I think the three managers they had in my tenure were pretty good in that regard. The team was just me and a front-end guy, and we had no problem keeping up with the workload.

My impression was that we'd squeezed all the blood we could out of the stone, yet the CEO wasn't going to accept "focus on other business problems" as an answer.

Eventually my pleas were heard and they consulted out a new platform. They didn't pick a platform that I wanted to administer, so I moved on. The fourth manager they hired after I left did not appear to have made any purchase on the problem the last time I talked to her.

I naively thought the problem was technology, but the real problem was the expectations of the CEO. There was nothing I could do about it, of course, so it worked out for the best.

That is because business regards its technical staff "in comtempt" and that is a direct quote from one of my previous bosses (a director at on of the largest publishers in the world)

"We keep our developers away from sales teams as they tend to be dreamkillers."

A client one time told me in the past. At the time, I wanted to ask, "so, how badly are you treating them?"

I've seen the same issue, only they never tried it in house. Instead they spent a million or so over 5 years with different consultants who all did an extremely poor job and each time through out previous work and requirements.

This problem isn't unique to in house teams. It's hard to find and motivate competent people whether salaried or consulting.

Well put.

Do you still do consulting?

Please reach me at brandon {at} brandonreiss {dot} com to explore an opportunity with a small e-commerce retailer/wholesaler.

This is absolutely true. Ive been lucky that the last 17 years of my career have been spent reporting to the CEO and have had a large amount of leeway in my position. That's not always the case and a bad leadership team can't create a good culture.

I should have made a case for reporting to the CEO myself. None of the three managers could figure out how to do it, and I spent more time than I should have trying to coach them on how to handle him. But I wanted to be comfortable and reporting to the CEO would have been the opposite of that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com