> Personally, I would encourage failure and risk taking with limited downside and unlimited upside.
But isn't that sort of what she's doing? She is limiting the downside by setting a time limit. She is ensuring people aim high enough with the $100m number.
I worked in engineering in Yahoo 2003-2005 (I feel old - it doesn't feel like 7 years ago...), specifically the European biling platform (yes, Yahoo had multiple - on the order of 10 distinct billing systems at the time, for various reasons, some good some not so good).
I spent those years without writing a single line of code at work, despite a small team, because about 2/3's of my time was taken up reading product requirements documents from business units that wanted to add features tied in with premium services / billing and attending project meetings.
Of all those projects, maybe 10% went anywhere. The rest spent months in PRD hell. Whole business units where dithering back and forth as to whether they should even try selling stuff, when the resource cost of trying was substantially smaller than the resource cost of the endless project meetings.
There were probably no $100m opportunities amongst the ones I reviewed when limited to the countries in Europe that actually were actively involved with the billing team. But that was part of the problem: People were far more concerned with delivering stuff that was successful than with the big picture, and so we only got go-ahead for projects when the business unit were really, really sure they'd make a good amount of money from adding premium services to a product.
And then only market by market, with many markets remaining totally unserved because the local team didn't believe in the project enough to want to stick their necks out. While I was there, we kept trying to get Yahoo Italy and Spain to start billing for something - anything - for example; in 4 years that went nowhere.
> Personally, I would encourage failure and risk taking with limited downside and unlimited upside.
But isn't that sort of what she's doing? She is limiting the downside by setting a time limit. She is ensuring people aim high enough with the $100m number.
I worked in engineering in Yahoo 2003-2005 (I feel old - it doesn't feel like 7 years ago...), specifically the European biling platform (yes, Yahoo had multiple - on the order of 10 distinct billing systems at the time, for various reasons, some good some not so good).
I spent those years without writing a single line of code at work, despite a small team, because about 2/3's of my time was taken up reading product requirements documents from business units that wanted to add features tied in with premium services / billing and attending project meetings.
Of all those projects, maybe 10% went anywhere. The rest spent months in PRD hell. Whole business units where dithering back and forth as to whether they should even try selling stuff, when the resource cost of trying was substantially smaller than the resource cost of the endless project meetings.
There were probably no $100m opportunities amongst the ones I reviewed when limited to the countries in Europe that actually were actively involved with the billing team. But that was part of the problem: People were far more concerned with delivering stuff that was successful than with the big picture, and so we only got go-ahead for projects when the business unit were really, really sure they'd make a good amount of money from adding premium services to a product.
And then only market by market, with many markets remaining totally unserved because the local team didn't believe in the project enough to want to stick their necks out. While I was there, we kept trying to get Yahoo Italy and Spain to start billing for something - anything - for example; in 4 years that went nowhere.