This is a frustrating (bullshit?) blog post because it starts out poorly, gets really good, and ends on a whimper. It has no advice to offer other than than "leave me alone, I'm doing things".
High performing collaborative teams and teams-of-teams have the ownership culture that he is describing. But they also have a team level view of progress (kanban is one approach, and not a bad one, story backlogs are another, etc.) because any large initiative requires dependency management, throughput flow visibility, and coordination across teams.
Yes, individual small teams with autonomy perform best and should have minimal hard dependencies on other teams. "one piece continuous flow" is similar what he's describing as the optimal team flow with minimal waste, which is what Toyota sought to reach in as many teams as they could. Kanban and such approaches for signaling queues and jobs was a patch when it wasn't possible to get "one piece continuous flow"
But in complex products and projects .. dependencies, uncertainty in requirements, design, knowledge, etc. lead to queues, and thus a need for visibility of the queue. this requires active management of priorities, timelines, risks, and resource allocation, so that it isn't just a blind exercise of "trust me bro".
Progress is also best described as "jobs to be done" (whether user stories, or kanban tasks, or whatever) rather than lines of code or other poor metrics. .. learning things is a job to be done... iterating on design is a job to be done... if these lead to new tangents, restarts, cancellations, code removal, or elimination of bad components, sub-projects, or approaches is just as valuable in the long run as creating new things. All of that requires "collaboration".
I think the issue isn't "collaboration" it is poor "management" and process to organize humans for results.
It's almost like if you don't have dependencies and coupling, you really just end up with a toolbox with widgets that don't do anything special when put together.
High performing collaborative teams and teams-of-teams have the ownership culture that he is describing. But they also have a team level view of progress (kanban is one approach, and not a bad one, story backlogs are another, etc.) because any large initiative requires dependency management, throughput flow visibility, and coordination across teams.
Yes, individual small teams with autonomy perform best and should have minimal hard dependencies on other teams. "one piece continuous flow" is similar what he's describing as the optimal team flow with minimal waste, which is what Toyota sought to reach in as many teams as they could. Kanban and such approaches for signaling queues and jobs was a patch when it wasn't possible to get "one piece continuous flow"
But in complex products and projects .. dependencies, uncertainty in requirements, design, knowledge, etc. lead to queues, and thus a need for visibility of the queue. this requires active management of priorities, timelines, risks, and resource allocation, so that it isn't just a blind exercise of "trust me bro".
Progress is also best described as "jobs to be done" (whether user stories, or kanban tasks, or whatever) rather than lines of code or other poor metrics. .. learning things is a job to be done... iterating on design is a job to be done... if these lead to new tangents, restarts, cancellations, code removal, or elimination of bad components, sub-projects, or approaches is just as valuable in the long run as creating new things. All of that requires "collaboration".
I think the issue isn't "collaboration" it is poor "management" and process to organize humans for results.