When a company reaches a certain size, collaboration stops looking like a small team solving a problem. Managers start adding systems and tools: 360-degree talent reviews, performance ratings, OKRs, KPIs, quarterly reviews, year-end reviews, promotion defenses. The hope is that these rituals will keep collaboration efficient. In practice, they mostly make management easier and frontline work slower.
A product manager at a small B2B software company spots an improvement. He sketches it on scrap paper, mentions it over lunch to a couple of developers he knows well, and by the time everyone is back at their desks, a frontend engineer has thrown together an interaction and interface. That evening, after the 10 p.m. shuttle has left, the PM's phone buzzes: “That thing is live. Go test it.”
Now put the same idea inside a large internet company.
The PM first writes a PRD that nobody would call clear. The product director reviews it one by one, like holding court. Design has to produce a high-fidelity prototype, then arrange research and testing, because only after that will engineering agree to start. The technical plan and documentation take a day or two. Once the code finally lands, there is another chain of testing and release steps. The weekly report looks impressively full. The customer has been waiting anxiously for two weeks.
At this point someone usually objects: How do you ensure quality without all that? Software workshops are unprofessional. You are planting problems for later. Only bootcamp graduates work like this. If you talk like that, you clearly never studied software engineering properly.
That is not the argument.
Scientific, disciplined, systematic software development is not the problem. Plenty of people in the internet industry are highly educated and smart; they know what ideal collaboration looks like. The problem is what happens inside large companies. The United States has political correctness. Internet companies have process correctness. Standards and methods turn into tools for avoiding blame, and a simple iterative process becomes complex and redundant.
The very un-agile “agile development process” is only one example. Large companies have ten thousand other ways to slow down organizational collaboration.
A quarter has 13 weeks. The company spends two weeks at the end of the previous quarter summarizing and reviewing, then two weeks at the start of the new quarter setting plans and goals. The next two weeks usually go into breaking down and confirming those goals. Count the remainder: how much time is actually left for work?
To manage a huge organization, the company pours effort into collaboration rules. Those same rules are what make it bloated and inefficient. When a B2B team faces the market, the inherited, unchangeable rules become a cage. Market signals and user feedback drown in an endless meeting schedule.
How is that fight supposed to be won?