Aligning with the Business

Abstract

Ciao was a price comparison and product review web site that was founded in Germany and became the top shopping web site (shown in Figure 4-1) in many European markets attracting 19.6 million unique visitors per month in Europe by 2008. Microsoft purchased Ciao in 2008 to bolster its Bing search engine in Europe. Eric had the opportunity to work with the Ciao team as its new engineering manager after the Microsoft acquisition. What Eric observed was a development team that was extremely well aligned with the business – more aligned than he had observed most Microsoft teams to be in his prior work. There were many factors that allowed for this high degree of alignment. In this chapter, we will examine several of these factors that allowed Ciao to be successful.