Marc Haine explains why the biggest company problems happen between departments, not within them. Most roles like COO or CFO don't own cross-functional accountability, especially in startups. He focuses on finding where processes break across teams and separating drama from the actual issues.
The biggest issues in companies are not within the functions. They are between the functions. It's kind of a no-man's land. Within each function, there is a senior manager that, who is typically capable and skillful to deal with matters within their function. But when there are cross-functional issues, very few people in the organization are liable, are held accountable for that. It's a COO. Chief Operating Officer, if exists, CFO whose focus is money, and IT department who's focused on IT. So there is no one really in a typical, especially startups, there is no one in the company that has the bandwidth and the skill to deal with things that fall between the functions. I identified this very early in my career and that has been my focus even when I did several years of engineering and then product management, marketing, all kinds of departments, my attention was in how things fail, where do they fail, how we can do things better. And most of it was in the area between functions. So in this case here with this company, that was no different. And most of the work after identifying what's actually going on, separating all the stories and Drama? Then we could deal with the actual issues that exist.
