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My last retail employer had multiple billions in revenue and had a really nice niche where they could apply a negative margin service to sell more goods. And a lot of their product catalog is far enough from Amazon's wheelhouse that they had room to operate.

That being said, their ecommerce org was still a complete mess. They were spending a ton of money operating a homemade ecommerce platform based on 2007 technology. They even had a mainframe running some critical features that they couldn't manage to deprecate. They ran everything focused on costs and didn't even do it right because they never considered the long-term benefits of investments. The architecture was multiple balls of mud. Teams were all aligned horizontally. Meeting customer needs wasn't never a factor in any decision making that I saw (and I spoke regularly to the CTO).



> Teams were all aligned horizontally.

What does this mean?


They are aligned by system instead of by feature set. Anyone running a lower level system was disconnected from anything customer facing.




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