On Productivity of Middlemen and Handovers
In November 2022 I posted an infographic on LinkedIn that got a lot of attention. Essentially, infographic promotes direct communication between product developers and customers. People reacting in the comments brought multiple arguments against this approach. Each argument deserves its own article.
Internal Customer is oxymoron
Sometimes companies defend component teams by bending the term customer. They say things like “other teams in our company are our customers, we have internal customers”. For example, they have a “platform team” that delivers the platform to the application teams - their internal customers. Or they have a testing framework team that delivers the testing framework to the other development teams in the company.