Overheard on a train platform:
“It’s products now, not teams anymore. You know, products not projects?”
Sounds like somebody is undergoing a digital transformation.
Overheard on a train platform:
Published
Overheard on a train platform:
“It’s products now, not teams anymore. You know, products not projects?”
Sounds like somebody is undergoing a digital transformation.
John Hardy Developer 
And they were standing on a platform?
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Yes speaking to someone on a phone.
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I’m just thinking, You know, platforms not products…
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🎶 Everyone wants to be a platform until they are one. 🎶
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Within big corps this is the new mantra. Their technology doesn’t just assist their business (ie projects) their business now is technology (ie products).
Like most corporate-bullshit-speak there’s an element of truth in that they are all seeing the need to lift their games to Silicon Valley levels. The biggest firms in the post GFC world are from the Valley not Wall Street.
They won’t get there of course because they don’t have anything like the same levels of competion that the top tier tech firms face but that’s their aspiration for now.
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Well, you’re either a technology company or a failing company these days. Also you can be both of course 🙂
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(editing that comment reminded me that Google employs compete dingbats in the G+ app department)
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It’s all part of Amazon’s marketing plan to get the big corps to store all their compute power and data with them. They are selling them the dream that X Provincial Bank will be the next Facebook or Google!
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Instead of just being the hugely profitable but lazy fourth member of a state constructed quadropoly.
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One thing I’ve seen in many organizations is the attempt to find a way to be a technology company, without letting developers run the company. Developers do lots of stupid things, of course, especially when dealing with humans but also in other areas, including in dealing with technology. But, fundamentally, you cannot have a great technology company with strategy set by someone who doesn’t understand technology. It’s even worse than movie companies trying to avoid letting directors make decisions, or publishing companies trying to avoid letting authors make decisions, because unlike movies or books it is often not even apparent that inferior technology is inferior, even after it’s made (until you need to change something, or security incidents cause problems, or whatever). I think this is something similar to what warrior leaders felt when nation-states arose that were led by bureaucrats, and later politicians; “these dweebs cannot be the people in charge now, I hate that idea”. But the percentage of successful technology companies that are run by former technology types, is way higher than among the Fortune 500 generally, and not just for historic reasons.
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