By Nishant Kothary CHAPTER 12wise once said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over
and over and expecting different results.”
The goal of this chapter is simple: to introduce you to the human being
as the center of every success or failure in our lives. But not in that tired
way we’re all guilty of where we commiserate and vent on Twitter. Or the
way where we publish blog posts about the bureaucratic deadweights that
are the true bottlenecks to innovation. Or even that way where we write
articles, chapters and books that disseminate best practices for dealing
with said deadweights. We’ve done it all before, and we’ll surely do it
again. But right now, let’s resist the convenient cover of insanity. Let’s stop
putting more lipstick on the pig, and instead explore why the pig is so
darn ugly in the first place. That is, let’s talk about the root of the problem
instead of the symptoms.
Grab a seat (and a drink).
Too Many Cooks don’t Spoil the Broth
A few years ago I happened to find myself in charge of the redesign and
consolidation of a set of very popular developer community sites, a project
we’ll dub Project Unify. We were combining five different sites, each of
which had been serving a different target audience, and run by a different
internal team. Together, the sites served thousands of unique types of
media: everything from HD videos to short blog posts. Some organized
their content in the form of shows; others featured live streaming content.
The media came in all shapes, formats and sizes. The visual tone and
information architecture of each website was different. By most measures,
it was a complicated redesign.
To make matters worse, there were a ton of stakeholders across the
company who were going to be involved in this project: hosts of the
various shows, developers working on the different sites, the founders of
the sites, managers, and even a few executives. And most of them weren’t
very happy about the existence of this project, for it meant that their day-