Visionaries vs. The Frankensteins

In big companies, based on my experience, there’s so much friction between product and development teams. The #1 reason for this divide is ‘organizational culture’. While the product, leadership, and marketing teams are wearing one hat, the development teams’ mind is in a totally different world.

Below are some differences – I leave it to the reader to conclude which teams are on what side of the culture spectrum. It’s up to the leadership team to fix the divide.

The Visionaries

• Have critical thinking abilities
• Focus on the future
• Take calculated risks
• Experiment a lot
• Learn from failures
• Experts in iterative development and course corrections
• Project goal is important than personal goals
• Understand that personal growth is a byproduct of successful products
• Own failures and deflect credit for successes to everyone who contributed
• Work with the frankensteins, have no time to find fault with them

The Frankensteins

• Are mostly into binary thinking
• Expect every line of code to reach production
• Expect every product to become successful
• Averse to risk taking
• Scared of failures
• Get trapped in unproductive biases
• Always working for a visionary, yet finding faults with visionaries!
• Attach themselves with successful projects and detach from the failures
• Personal and team goals are important than product goals
• Do similar work every day, get monthly paycheck, repeat