> So in addition to the above problems with decision-making, each team had no idea what the other team was actually doing until it had been done for weeks.
The Open Source development model addresses this. By removing meetings and forcing all work to be done "in the open", it is impossible not to know what is going on, because you can always just go look at what's going on. Subscribe to the mailing list and you will always know what is going on. Or don't and read the mailing list archives. Look at the patches, read the documentation, understand the context from discussions. There is no waiting for a team meeting, there is no arbitrary line of organizational hierarchy in your way. Just make a patch and send it in.
There are of course still delays and discussions and disagreements and whatnot; that's the nature of collaboration with multiple humans with agency and ownership. But you never need 24 people to design a menu, because you just start designing it, and people can discuss the work asynchronously on the mailing list. There is no ceremony. All organization is ad-hoc, dynamic, decentralized, and just-in-time. By the time a large "corporate" team has finished building one feature, the open source developers have already released and tested three alpha versions.
I think every product owner should read The Cathedral And The Bazaar and put the bazaar method into practice (or at least try it!).
The Open Source development model addresses this. By removing meetings and forcing all work to be done "in the open", it is impossible not to know what is going on, because you can always just go look at what's going on. Subscribe to the mailing list and you will always know what is going on. Or don't and read the mailing list archives. Look at the patches, read the documentation, understand the context from discussions. There is no waiting for a team meeting, there is no arbitrary line of organizational hierarchy in your way. Just make a patch and send it in.
There are of course still delays and discussions and disagreements and whatnot; that's the nature of collaboration with multiple humans with agency and ownership. But you never need 24 people to design a menu, because you just start designing it, and people can discuss the work asynchronously on the mailing list. There is no ceremony. All organization is ad-hoc, dynamic, decentralized, and just-in-time. By the time a large "corporate" team has finished building one feature, the open source developers have already released and tested three alpha versions.
I think every product owner should read The Cathedral And The Bazaar and put the bazaar method into practice (or at least try it!).