by starkparker | 2025-11-01 00:03:08+00:00
This series has come up a few times, and as someone who's worked mostly on inherently cross-functional teams (support, docs, QA) it exemplifies the most dysfunctional places that I've worked at, because it presumes that the people gating connections between silos exist, are competent at it, are incentivized toward both openness and transparency, and are held accountable if they fail.

Which, in practice, never all fucking happens at once.

If your job is to both facilitate and limit unnecessary communication between teams, and you systematically build your org around centralized communications chokepoints to protect R&D from product/marketing/support, you need to field and triage all of the requests made to developers for everyone else to effectively do their own jobs.

As the post notes:

> You want local groups to be able to act independently and have what they need to be successful. You want centralized functions to set high level objectives and coordinate where necessary to produce the right outcomes.

But nobody hires for this. C-suite sure as fuck doesn't want to do it. Their direct reports treat anything that _limits_ the visibility of their accomplishments like poison. So it ends up on the next level of project/product managers, or tech leads at orgs philosophically opposed to the concept of a PM; either way, that person already has too much work to do reporting to (or shielding the devs from) upper management.

I've worked in exactly one place where the company siloed with a someone who was designated as responsible for the silo and also wasn't overloaded with tasks that compromised their ability to do that.

So one of a few things happen:

- The people supporting customers can't get the information they need, so they do a bad job. The company defends the PMs and devs, the customers blame the people in support for incompetence, the support teams get flushed, and nothing changes for anyone. The silo has done its job; the customer is unhappy, support is ineffective, docs are written blind, the PM and devs get pulled into customer escalations between increasingly rare moments of focus.

- The support teams ignore all directives from upper management, dodge the PMs, and establish direct relationships with engineers. The silo has failed; the customer is supported better, but the devs are miserable from constant moments of small distractions, and product progress slows to a grind.

- The company recognizes that the Platonic model of siloing described in OP doesn't work in an org led by glory hounds (so, all tech companies) with more stakeholders outside of R&D than in it (so, most B2B and especially B2C tech companies). It then restructures teams such that _some_ of the devs are outside of the silo to deal exclusively with those requests, which works only if you have enough unicorn devs who are both good at their job, social, can independently manage unrelated projects, and consistently document their own processes.

The second post in the series suggests Amazon's single-threaded ownership for inherently cross-functional teams, which is where I gave up trying to give this the benefit of the doubt. Consolidating on a single point of failure as it recommends, instead of a fourth leg on the three-legged stool focused on cross-functional tasks and org awareness, will delight a team's engineers at the disproportional expense of every other person who's forced to deal with that owner.