Carl Hutzler’s Blog

The last week has been the most trying for me in terms of my 9+ year career at AOL. Even compared to November 2003 when spam complaints went from 4 million a day to 21 million, the last week was far more challenging.

What was so challenging?

Well it was certainly a combination of many things, but for me the single most important issue was the continued uphill struggle to try and get things accomplished became even more difficult (something I could not even believe was possible).

Why is it so hard to get things done at AOL?

1. Lack of clarity on stategy with a sprinkle of conflicting strategies on top

2. Lack of priority of what is most important

Geek analogy:

When a database gets too big or busy to be housed on one box, engineers use a multitude of ways to allow that database to be spread across many boxes, many disks, many CPUs, etc. Usually this involves partitioning the database such that transactions can be processed on many machines in parallel. This is called scaling and it is one of the biggest challenges AOL, Google, Yahoo, etc face when trying to build apps for millions of users.

In much the same way software engineers scale systems from a single box/instance to many instances, large organizations need to scale as well. Scaling involves parallelization and that is where AOL has a significant hurdle right now. Decisions are only made at the top level of the company….and in many cases our CEO, Jon Miller, is the one having to make the calls. Some of this is due to the different business units we are organized around but I think more of it is due to items 1 and 2 above.

A) How can a Product Manager make decisions on the right features for a system if the overall strategy of the company is unclear to him/her?

B) How can a Software Developer or Line Manager decide which features to drop from the first release of a product if deadlines are approaching and trade-offs must be made?

C) How can a Program Manager decide what feature to create and in what order?

ANSWERS to all of the above = they can’t because they do not have the knowledge of strategy or priority to make a choice.

So without the knowledge of what the company is trying to do, why, and what things are most important, the organization is not empowered. Hence most every decision is an escalation all the way up to the CEO which takes time and frustrates the un-empowered.

Furthermore, if someone is crazy enough to try and make a decision they feel is right, there is also a very real possibility that someone else will question that decision. Both people end up being right and also wrong as neither person really knows what the right thing is for the company as there is no strategy to compare against.

And of course both sides will have good arguments for their points of view, but just about every difficult decision has good arguments on both sides…otherwise it would not be a difficult decision in the first place!

AOL really needs a clear, simple, easy to understand (and explain) strategy for winning back members and attracting new users. I hope we get that soon. I know once we have it, we will begin to execute and produce again.

As an example, today in my little world of “AOL Mail”, we got that strategy. We also got priority in terms of what parts of the strategy were most imporant and which ones were secondary (which we can work on later). And almost immediately (within minutes, I kid you not!) everyone involved was elated and focused on what needed to be done.

What a week!