Organizational Design For Product Companies

A good and effective organizational structure enables an organization to function more effectively and with greater efficiency. Also organizational structure differs from industry to industry and per Edwards Demming, organizational design depends not only on what the organization is doing today but also upon what the organization will be doing tomorrow.
 

For software product organizations, the organization can be divided along 3 major tracks: the marketing track (market research & marketing analysis), the product management and design track (information architecture, interaction design, visual design & usability engineering) and the actual product development track (architecture, engineering, project management, SaaS delivery & even operations).  In product companies, there is also often conflict between the marketing/product managers group and the product development group. While the former typically pushes for early releases, the other focuses on the technical integrity of the product more than anything.  Therefore conflict is built into the design of the organization itself and the absence of conflict may actually give rise to sub-optimal results.
 

Startup organizations are a little different in that they are typically smaller in size and that the personalities and individual skill sets involved actually matter more than the organization structure itself. So therefore roles and responsibilities here are even more important than the right organization structure. In fact, with good intentions aka strong organization culture, any organizational structure is workable and the organization can be designed around the strengths of individual leaders.
 

An organization template I have seen for organizations with focus on innovation and problem solving (as it is with product organizations) is team based. The management style is participative, goals are set mutually and the reward system is in the form of a team bonus. In fact, organizations that go as far as to allow their employees to self-organize and form teams have actually become much more effective and efficient. One company I know of goes as far as to have uniform mobile workstations with state-of-the-art networked computers. People here are always mobile and their office has become an environment that maximizes collaboration and execution.  Remember the ‘skunk works’ concept whose origins lies in at Lockheed Burbank? This concept is now widely used in product organizations and describes an organization that is given a high degree of autonomy and is unhampered by bureaucracy.

Of Lateral Thinking and 6 Hats

Creativity should be producible on demand and should not be left to mere chance or so is what Dr. Edward De Bono truly believes in. The creator of lateral thinking and various other thinking tools has given to the World today what has now been adopted by schools from over 20 countries as part of the their curriculum. Large organizations such as Prudential, Boeing, Siemens, Honeywell, Motorola, Eli Lily, Fidelity, NASA, IBM and Texas Instruments are wide users of the 6 hats methodology that I will briefly outline here.

Per De Bono, critical thinking has core limitations in the sense that it is more concerned with discovering what is right and wrong and less to do with movement of ideas and their creation. He takes on the Great Gang of 3: Socrates, Aristotle and Plato and speaks about idea generating tools such as random entry, provocation, challenge, concept fan and disproving. In a random entry approach, an object can be chosen at random and associated with the problem at hand. Say for example, we can choose a fax machine for designing a website better. Since a fax machine sends content to cell-phones directly perhaps the same can be done for websites that can directly send content to users via RSS feeds. The challenge idea generation tool asks why in order to generate fresh ideas. To illustrate using an example, why can't we have planes land on their heads? Though the idea may seem outrageous at the onset, it has its benefits: for one everybody would also have their seat belts on. For another, the pilots always would be able to see where they land. In fact the latter was incorporated as a design in one of the fighter plans deployed for the Vietnam War.

Lateral Thinking and 6 Hats have to do with exploration: exploration of subjects where all participants can contribute with facts, new ideas and feelings. As per the 6 hats thinking framework, there are 5 distinct states in which the brain can be sensitized that correspond to 5 hats and 1 hat is used for moderating all of these 5 states. Why hat? Because, putting on a hat is a very deliberate process. Because it is part of a uniform (a woman wears the hat of a homemaker, a mother, an executive at different times of the day). And most importantly the ego goes on vacation when you deliberately in one of these states and nobody can call you crazy anymore. Each of the hats has been given a distinct color and functionality is expressed via this.

The 6 hats are white, black, yellow, green, red and blue. White stands for paper. It concerns information or key absences of information and is used to segregate facts from opinions. Black is the color of the robe that a stern judge wears. Participants identify barriers, hazards, risks and other negative connotations when wearing this hat. This is the most powerful of all the hats but should never be overused. Yellow is the color of sunshine & optimism. It Identifies benefits and is the opposite of black. Green stands for fertility. Wearing this, participants think new thoughts for the sake of identifying new possibilities itself. Red is color of fire and warmth. Participants state their feelings and gut instincts when wearing this hat and this hat is used as a quick system of voting. Generally this hat is never used for more than a minute at a time. Blue, the last hat, is the color of the Sky. This is the hat under which all participants discuss the thinking process. The facilitator will generally wear it throughout the 6 hats discussion.

There is no hard and fast rule in hat selection and their pacing for meetings. Adapt as necessary. Meetings generally start with Blue and end with Blue. While same hats can be used multiple times in a single discussion, there are some hats which may never be chosen for a particular type of meeting. Also one can do a hat on a hat. Here are some examples of hat selections. Pace and sequence hats rather carefully. Time limits prevent participants from rambling off.
Initial Ideas - Blue, White, Green, Blue
Choosing between alternatives - Blue, White, Yellow, Black, Red, Blue
Quick Feedback - Blue, Black, Green, Blue
Process Improvement - Blue, White, Yellow, Black, Green, Red, Blue
Solving Problems - Blue, White, Green, Red, Yellow, Black, Green, Blue
Performance Review - Blue, Red, White, Yellow, Black, Green, Red, Blue

The entire idea is to go beyond criticism, pessimistic or argumentative thinking. Going beyond this is right v/s this is wrong or beyond gut feel and emotion. The objective here is to focus your thinking by using 1 hat at a time and it serves as a convenient Mechanism for ‘Switching Gears'. The framework aims to create awareness that there are multiple perspectives at hand and not be worried about speaking one's mind.

It is to be noted that the 6 hats framework is not an end in itself. Often, there are multiple iterations and detailed reports are the outcome of a session which are then further analyzed to solve the problem at hand.