> * Keeping the company engineer-driven as far as possible.
That's an awfully large blanket statement that isn't right for many companies. Zappos places the emphasis on customer service and they're doing fine just as an example.
I don't know why that got downvoted, because you're absolutely right. It's not necessarily the case that every company needs to prioritize "being engineer focused". As painful as it may be for some of us to acknowledge, if a company has a made a conscious decision to pursue a certain value discipline ("customer intimacy" for example), then it may not be terribly important to have an engineering focused culture.
However, to be fair, michaelochurch did say "keeping the company engineer driven as far as possible", which is not a blanket statement that every company must be totally engineer focused.
At the end of the day, every company has to make a series of tradeoffs and weigh different priorities against others. And the right choice of tradeoffs is (or should be) driven by a conscious decision about the company's value discipline and strategy.
That's an awfully large blanket statement that isn't right for many companies. Zappos places the emphasis on customer service and they're doing fine just as an example.