Tail Wagging

I've been fighting with this problem for a while now. There are forces at work in the world that exist to complicate life. In a sufficiently large organization there are bureaucracies to protect the bureaucracies.

Lately I've been thinking about what actually provides value to the customer. And how to keep things focused on that. It's tough when your job has something to do with building infrastructure. How thin can I keep this infrastructure so it doesn't distract from the job of providing value? Or I can pick a number (say 3) and limit the number of levels of indirection between the things that provide value to customers (in our case products), and the things I'm working on right now?

Kathy Sierra's post and this excellent picture speaks to the topic nicely.