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Comment by Artgor | Hacker News Reader

"In Pulse surveys and conversations with many of you, we’ve heard that too much work requires coordination across teams, debates take too long, and decision-making rights are unclear. I’m sure many of you have felt that you spend too much time “aligning” rather than building, shipping, or serving customers. To improve this, we have reduced roles primarily focused on coordination, and have clarified the remit of the coordination roles that remain. "

Well, in theory this sounds reasonable. But who knows what will be the real consequences.

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I don't get it. Too much time is spent coordinating, so fire those who are responsible for coordination? Am I reading this wrong?

People whose primary job is to "coordinate" often, either in a well-meaning attempt to be thorough or just to be relevant, try to pull as many different people into any decision-making as possible.

So instead of me just getting approval from my manager, I need to get approval/buy-in from departments A, B, and C.

In that case, firing the "coordinator" person increases velocity because parts of the business processes they prop disappear.

> In that case, firing the "coordinator" person increases velocity because parts of the business processes they prop disappear.

So you get rid of the coordinator. What then? Does this magically unblock people?

Let me frame this differently: if coordinating teams creates as much problems and impedance as you claim, how come Uber hired them to begin with? I mean, either Uber was shooting itself in the foot then, or it is now. Which one is it?

> Does this magically unblock people?

Yes? Removing and/or minimizing detractors/hangers-ons/randoms from a project is an important part of running a project. Especially in corporate scenarios where telling people to go pound sand is, unfortunately, not an option, more elaborate strategies must be employed.

> If coordinating teams creates as much problems and impedance as you claim, how come Uber hired them to begin with? I mean, either Uber was shooting itself in the foot then, or it is now. Which one is it?

Are you thinking that humans can predict behavior and evolution of social systems, and especially how they would behave after some change is forced upon them?

In my opinion, that cannot be further from the truth. Any sufficiently complex social system, which Uber with 30k+ employees definitely is, exists and evolves more or less independently from how any one individual part of this system might wish. Even if it's a CEO.

Uber leadership thought cross-team coordination would help them, so they hired a bunch of people to do it. That might have been a correct idea at a time, or at least on paper, it looked like a correct move. But in the end, it did not pan out. So they probably shot themselves in the foot back then. Did they shoot themselves in the foot now? Who knows? (Spoiler: no one) We'll see once enough time has passed.

There were too many meetings, so they got rid of the people whose jobs were to create lots of meetings.

That's how I read it, too.

They pinpointed the problem of over-coordination to the messenger (coordinator) instead of the teams demanding final approval over launches (coordination).

Won't merging different teams under a single owner only push the problem further down the org chart?

The thinking in these types of reorgs is typically to push it so far down the chart that it comes out the other side

The coordinators enable extra coordination that is not worth doing. The coordination itself is the problem.

I've heard this at other companies and it's almost always an issue of upper management holding too much control over decision making, or poorly communicating actual business objects, but it's project managers and middle management that will bear the brunt of the layoffs.

Leadership Team holding TOO much control over decision making AND poorly communicating actual business objective.s

"Complain about coordination, get laid off" is what this reads like

It's logical if you view them as unsuccessful.

But if "decision-making rights are unclear" is listed, it seems unlikely those people were the problem.

I think the idea is that if you go from 10 decision makers to 5 decision makers, coordidination and securing a decision will become easier

So TPMs are getting the axe? Product managers too?

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