Ah, the ghosts of yesteryear. I remember reading Yahoo’s glowing testimonies of implementing agile in their development process. So much time saved! Such productivity! Very happy developers. Much scrum.
Then of course, Yahoo got hacked. Multiple times. What happened? Who’s to blame? Corporate culture and strategy, of course.
Yahoo did not prioritize engineering – google and now amazon are notorious for investing in infrastructure done right. Scalable. Automated. Very attractive to good engineers.
Yahoo did not prioritize engineers – did not hire the best, did not pay to get the best, did not promote the best. Yahoo though it was a media company. They though search was unimportant. Even when Yahoo engineers were pointing out that they were using google instead of yahoo for their searches.
Paul Graham thinks yahoo failed because they let the suits “adult supervise” the developers, and the hacker culture central to a tech company left. I agree.
And the death-throes under Mayer? Bad acquisitions, failing revenue, scattered strategy, and widely criticized leadership.
Why do I bring this up now? Because process frameworks can’t fix lack of strategy. It’s a timeless lesson. I’ve been doing process this week. And if you are not brought in to do strategy and there is no strategy, your only option is to run.
Further reading:
http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html
https://www.forbes.com/sites/miguelhelft/2015/11/19/the-last-days-of-marissa-mayer/#57b16636141f
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