Just finished the Netflix Culture pres…
I know that process is a dirty word in nearly all creative companies, mostly due to its rigid connotations. I believe that process can be a great guideline, as opposed to a rule; a tool for roadmapping as opposed to “the way things are done.” It just depends on how strictly the parameters are presented.
While Netflix touches on this point (Slide 61), they don’t think of it as a solution. Instead, they consider hiring High Performance Employees as a cure-all. Yet, in my experience, hiring High Performance Employees means working to onboard super-specialists in each respective field. Even the most organized X is going to want to focus on getting their job done, not on how they can work with others to complete a task (this is especially true in the case of specialists).
A utopian vision of the “Highly Aligned, Loosly Coupled” (Slide 90) team, in which cross-functional groups only discuss strategy and goals is a bit unrealistic. In for nearly every product release, there’s a logical order of operations to be considered: a toy’s prototypes should be finalized before its package is created, likewise, the packaging should be considered before distribution channels are finalized. To ignore this chain only invites real-time revisions, which are ultimately costly and simply inefficient.
The solution here is to create a team that understands that a logical workflow is important, but also believes in keeping this workflow open and adaptable to each release. The toy above is not going to have the same steps to completion that a board game will. Workflow planning needs to be an early and vital part of strategic meetings; the entire project does not need to be laid out from point A, but a general roadmap of how a team is to reach its goals is crucial. Maybe I’m cynical, but I simply don’t believe that a team of superstars, left to their own devices, will act in a team’s best interest. They were hired to act in their role’s best interest.
In the end, simply communicating the fact that you’re building a roadmap, and not an assembly line eases process-fear. Each project should be approached with a fresh set of eyes (and expectations), as opposed to a cut-and-paste overlay of a previous plan. My guess is that general outlines will stick, but project-specific details will always need need to be tailored.
That said, I think there are a couple of amazing cultural gems in here:
1) “It’s about effectiveness, not effort” (Slide 33)
2) For many companies, a standard vacation policy is silly (Slide 66)
3) Employees need context, not control (Slide 81)
