Monkey Management

This article does a good job of touching on how empire-style organizational structures are dysfunctional.<p>The reason monkey keeps jumping around is because there are ZERO directly responsible owners of the delivery of the cross-functional outcome for the business.<p>In my company, we have PM, Sr. PM, Director of Product, VP of product - interfacing with Designer, Sr. Designer, Design manager, Sr. Design manager, director of design - interfacing with Eng 2, Sr Eng, Eng manager, Sr Eng manager, Eng director, Sr. Eng director, Eng VP.<p>Nobody can tell who owns the final decisions, decisions cannot be bubbled up, every management chain is only focused on their own goals. There is no decision-making structure at all. Inevitably projects get delayed or there are unaccounted issues. Then each management chain stack ranks their reports for not achieving goals - never once accepting that the empire structure never made any decisions when it was necessary.<p>The empire structure has to go. It is dysfunctional, doesn&#x27;t work, and only causes grief to everyone involved. Tasks are unnecessarily hard. It is easy to do. Just make your highest paid people directly responsible for outcomes. Give them the freedom to pull people from various org functions to get a project to success.

I know this wasnt what the article was about. However...<p>Product should have nothing to do with refactors on the systems. That should be an engineering responsibility.<p>Engineering needs to own their own availability to product. Engineering cant be 100% available to product and engineering needs to grow up and state their availability to product.

best solutions come when those that own the problem statement get enough info to slightly modify the problem<p>ie., it is far easier to make men be cleaner in urinals, than to make the cleaners more efficient<p>but if you can’t be the person to place a little bee on each stall you’re shit out of luck

Someone could take ownership of the project and make decisions instead of letting a monkey run around.

This is kind of adversarial sounding.<p>I’ve been in some messed up teams, but by the time it’s the blame game, I feel like people have stopped pretending?<p>Once the incentives are corrupted your business is living on borrowed time. But people generally agree (at least in private) when that’s happened.<p>YMMV.

&gt; It was boss-imposed meaning it cannot be disregarded by Product team. It is expected to deliver otherwise the team will face penalty.<p>This is often the problem. The bosses impose fad of the day as the next thing to work on and expect everybody to be excited about it. And the fads keep changing year after year. And when the managers try to pass the monkey to software engineers, in my case, engineers do a half-ass job because they don&#x27;t care about the new fad.

First thought, not having worked with more than 15 people simultaneously in many years:<p><i>Oof.</i>

This is the first time I hear about this analogy and I think it&#x27;s quite interesting. As with all business analogies, it probably doesn&#x27;t fit all situations. Like at some point the monkey gets split into sub-monkeys, and suddenly you have monkeys all over the place. That said, it gives a good way to think about how to find a way out during those meetings where teams get stuck and everyone stares at each other while a big &quot;ok, so what do we do now?&quot; question is hovering the table.

I was introduced to monkey management principles at my first job out of school. This was 1982. My boss taught it to me. Has helped me ever after.

This very nicely explains why I had to leave my job.<p>I became &#x27;lead of product development&#x27; but mostly had the role of PO. (and scrum master too i suppose). So it was more like several monkeys fighting on my back while I was face down in the mud, but yeah.