It’s all about the team effort

Here in Store Programming we take great pride in a job well done. Ever since we reorganized into our new team structure in the Fall of last year our productivity just keeps gaining momentum. Our code just keeps getting better and better, yet we are also getting it done faster than ever. How is this possible? With a little help from our friends, of course.
Back in the old days of Solid Cactus, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and people were gearing up to watch the 2008 Summer Olympics, as a department we were merely a collection of programmers. Sure there was a great sense of cohesion amongst ourselves, we even had a separate office space that was our own tiny kingdom, but the other departments might as well have been on another planet as far as we were concerned. If a project manager wanted to ask us a question in person, they would have to leave the main office area, exit the front door, walk past the bathrooms, take a van for a few blocks, switch over to mule cart to travel up the mountain, answer the riddles of the sphinx to cross the bridge, evade the ninjas, give the secret knock to enter the room, dodge a hail of nerf darts upon entry, and ask in a whisper “which one is [programmer name]?”, by which point they had forgotten what they came to ask in the first place. (Sadly, much more of that list is true than you would believe… I never did find out what happened to the mule after we moved.)
After we moved to our Shavertown location things were a little better in that programmers and project managers were only separated by a wall. The programmers lobbied to put barbed wire across the top, but the request was denied. (We were a regrettably anti-social lot back then.) Eventually programmers divided into teams, but we were still teams of programmers, but it was a step in the right direction. Finally, at long last, last Fall the wall came down (at least metaphorically) and the optimal set-up shone forth. Instead of dividing up by department, our teams are by product offering and made up of a project manager, a designer, a programmer, and the most important member, the customer. We are no longer a team of programmers, but rather a part of a more important team of collaborative cacti. Gone are the days where a programmer might know the name of the designer, but couldn’t pick their face out of a police line-up. Gone are the days of epic journey’s for the project managers to get information from the programmers. Now if a project manager needs something from a programmer, they turn to their left and ask. If they need something from a designer, they turn to their right. (These will be reversed when we open our Australian branch of Solid Cactus in 2053.) And if they need to know what last little touch will really make the project and over the top success, they (as a team) turn to the customer.
Thanks to the open communication we have with our designers, project managers, and our customers, we here in the Programming Department have been doing some of our best work ever, and been having some serious fun in the process. That’s the power of teamwork. We couldn’t be prouder of the work we are doing, or more grateful to our fellow team members. Thanks team!