I would be really interested to see this model applied to software. I am unaware of any firm that has done it this way so far — which is odd, because it really does seem tailor-made to suit our sort of work, no?
Or maybe I am missing something.
Or maybe I am missing something.
In a traditional software company, like a SaaS business, I don't know how it would translate. A developer fixing bugs might be important for the business, but ultimately is hard to translate to the bottom line. It's not like hiring a high level executive will have a guaranteed ROI in the same way.
-- It's hard to measure contributions of a dev in a team of 5-10 (how much was them, another dev, the PM, the designer?) while pretty clear for say a sales + sales eng pair.
-- Likewise, there's a danger of confusing incentivizes of having a dev make commission-based decisions, esp. when counter to what a PM needs to incentivize. in a sense, part of the PM's job is to prevent sales/marketing/management from confusing the rest of the org!
For product orgs, some companies do incentives and promotions based on profit/loss measurables ("1% datacenter power savings => $10M/yr savings => ..."), I think team-based w/ some sort of hierarchy. Alternatively, Cisco weird spin-in system worked well... for those liked by the involved leads.
When _not_ a product org and a more direct line to $, like a sales eng supporting sales, or a dev supporting a quant, easier to go commission/profit-sharing based..