The organization on the article is highly dysfunctional. But it's not going to be solved by higher management getting busy with the details of the project's work.
The problem here is how the work is divided, with everybody disempowered and turned into helpless cogs. If the goal was to prohibit any kind of improvement, they wouldn't make such a perfect attempt... And yet, that's the "normal" way to organize software development.
This was my impression of the article as well. Nobody can agree on what they're all trying to improve in the product and why, everyone's just trying to avoid being fired while working on their own stuff.
Organizational dysfunction is what I had in mind when I wrote it. It is highly complex. A founder led or a small organization is highly empowered to course correct the ship as opposed to organization with several layers of complexity. Everyone wants the buy-in but people don't have high agency.
Yeah, but tracking the monkey will only help you survive in there. It won't help fix the organization.
What fixes that problem is delegating the authority over team-sized problems to the teams, and structuring the organization so that larger issues are all contained over the equally sized management structures.
And despite management books all preaching that kind of organization, almost nobody does it in practice. A few problem-oriented organizations get the large structure right, but nobody at all gets the fine-grained delegation.
It is not an ownership problem only, the issue, which is very common, is that you need someone who can connect the dots and know that if he/she doesn't, the ball will go back and forth infinitely, and far from the soccer goal.
One profile that fits here is a generalist and/or program manager who had strong experience and skills in a specific field (e.g. developing software). The generalist can talk about sales, marketing, operations, and business and match with real experience. He/she knows how to move the ball forward.
An organizational solution to this problem is (Amazon’s) “single-threaded owner” model: all the disciplines report to (perhaps with a dotted line in a matrix org) one directly-responsible manager. The manager sees the big picture and can break down roadblocks, though they still may be building their own empire and reluctant to pivot or shut down their big project.
