By "themselves" do you mean Elon Musk? I wasn't under the impression that Tesla was much of a collaborative environment. Musk bans Kanban and Toyota Production System principles after all.
Tesla has its own principles, and collaboration is a big part of them. One reason so many engineers apply to work at Tesla is that they get to see their ideas implemented quickly and without excessive bureaucracy.
There are very good reasons why safety-critical products do not "move fast and break people". It is generally frowned upon in civil society to disregard safety and human life just to satisfy your curiosity and greed. I understand that the executive team at Tesla does not care given that they push a unfinished, defective, and criminally unsafe product like FSD onto the roads to make their numbers, but it reflects poorly to portray such a ingrained sociopathic company culture positively.
> Tesla's Model Y has been recognized as one of the safest cars of 2023 by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), receiving the agency's Top Safety Pick+ rating for the third year.
> Teslas on non-highways with Full Self Driving (FSD) engaged had just 0.31 accidents per million miles representing an 80% reduction in accidents compared with the average vehicle.
Oh great, the Tesla Safety report [1]. Can you let me know where in that “exhaustive” report I can find the number of accidents or miles driven used in that calculation? You know, the numerator and denominator? You know, the sort of hard-hitting data reporting expected out of a elementary school science fair project?
Almost like they hide that information like how they demand NHTSA redact all pertinent information from the NHTSA SGO database of ADAS crashes [2] so that the public can not fact check them.
Or like how their telemetry just happened to miss 90% of their confirmed fatal crashes which we only know about due to third party investigations as seen in the NHTSA SGO database.
Or maybe like how around 50% of the crashes Tesla investigates are fatal, but they just choose to leave ~95% uninvestigated as seen in the NHTSA SGO database. They are just worried investigating the crashes they caused will show FSD is too safe.
That report and Tesla’s reporting around FSD are gross, criminal malpractice. Only a sociopathic executive team and company culture would encourage safety reporting that intentionally deceptive.
Ultimately the issue is a lack of clear roles and responsibilities of a PM role defined, and a lack of accountability.
I agree with you that the "product org" is an entity that can become a political and bureaucratic entity rather than an enabler.
Personally, I think the Product role should be embedded within engineering teams and report up to the same leaders (level is debatable) so that a bad PM can be dealt with just like a bad engineer. Of course if your company can't get rid of bad engineers either, you have other problems.
And that's how it should work. The article is poorly written, but it does suggest more ownership from roles such as "area leads" which is close to Apple, I guess. With Jobs being the Uber Lead.
