Warner Bros. Discovery

A wonderfully talented group of people, from development to design to product.

All of them knowledgeable, passionate, and collaborative.

While the front-end tech stack is a little clunky due to a lack of investment, the back-end side continues to make advancements and experiment in new technologies and approaches.

The acquisition by AT&T was not kind, and the open and vibrant culture that made this place great got subsumed by a death march of contractual deadlines and seemingly arbitrary pivots in direction. We ended up taking a lot of shortcuts and half-finished features to market, then watched our infrastructure fall apart due to lack of maintenance, which crippled our capacity. Late nights and stressful weeks caused people to leave. It became clear that the organization wouldn't be able to deliver the experience our customers expect and our brands deserve without a change in leadership direction.

You have an amazing team that's been battle-tested. You should be communicating company goals so that they can provide solutions, not trying to dictate specific directions from the top. It just ends up ordering tasks in an awkward manner that takes twice as many resources to complete. We backtrack on previous investments to pursue half-solutions that cause as many issues as they resolve.

And the never-ending train of deadlines means we never have a chance to invest in longer-term projects or maintain our existing systems, causing everything to take longer and become more expensive.

I don't need you in my team's video calls or at our architecture meetings. I do need you to get us the resources we need to be successful, to prioritize our features, and to align all of our teams on that shared vision. Otherwise, we are constantly getting bounced from one priority to the next and never get anything done. Then we're stuck working evenings and weekends when we can focus, and people get burned out and leave.