Katie Dill: evaluation

Transcript context

…The original, the [inaudible 01:03:05] times. Yeah. And absolutely there are a lot of tie-ins to what I had seen. And the interesting part about how actually teams were working is that you would see that there was a lot of wasted work and there was a lot of misalignment in what we were trying to do because there was product managers and engineers that were sitting alongside each other making decisions and talking about the work and deciding things, and then designers were sitting over here in this other room and they were working on something, and then they'd meet up and it's like, "That's not aligned. No, that doesn't fit the goal. And you went that way, we were supposed to go over this way." And so interference in the sense that it was wasted work, it wasn't actually aligned to the goals, it was slower. And there were definitely benefits, there was real reasons for doing this, and I know there are companies including Apple that have separation of these things. But I think if you're going into that way of working, there's probably a lot of other decisions you need to make too in terms of the way the teams work. And so what I was seeing there was just the composite of all these aspects coming together that was not leading to more efficient and less interference. And so what we did was to evolve the way we were working and bring better alignment to the different functions. And, again, had done it with an approach about listening and came into that with a better understanding of getting to know the team and getting to know engineering and product and see what our goals were together so that when we were making changes we were making the changes together and we actually were aligned so that on the day that we opened the doors and brought design and product together and had spaces for folks to work together and they actually sat with each other, we still kept the creative space for this is where we'll do grits, this is where we'll do working sessions, this is where the folks that don't work in an embedded fashion we'll sit, but we had the best of both worlds in that way. And so with that alignment of the way that the teams were working together, there was much faster iteration cycles, better clarity on how the work was working, and we still kept and protected that room for creative space, literally the room in terms of figuratively speaking for allowing for creative exploration, but more aligned. And just so I understand, essentially you reorged the teams and not just physically moved people, but you changed the way the product and design and eng team was even organized?…

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