What is Product House Digital?
There are many ways of structuring a company’s inner workings. At Volkswagen Infotainment, we didn’t take any model right off the shelf. Rather, we looked for – and found – our own path. We call it Product House Digital (PHD) and it is currently active in its second iteration.
The PHD-model is centered around doing away with rigid departmental structures and moving away from thinking in hierarchal, separated silos. Rather than a traditional inverted tree structure, PHD is centered around larger, top-level projects – called solutions – that each focus on a specific product or goal. Staff for these solutions are drawn from competence pools called guilds.
A guild unites employees with various skills and competences that contribute to a similar expertise, such as software development or engineering. As a solution typically requires employees of myriad trades, they see staff from various guilds working side-by-side in cross-functional teams.
Last but not least there are several branches that enable the guilds and solutions to perform their best and deliver products and services on time and for the happiness of our customers. These are known as the Enablers and include HR, Office Management, Finance, Facility Management, Quality Management System and IT.