To scale up the system you’re changing, scale down the changes. The bigger and more complex the system you’re working on, the more people involved, the more affect a change can have — the smaller each change needs to be. When change is expensive, when it’s scary, don’t make fewer changes. Work to make changes …
There’s a story about some brilliant design that made carrots more accessible to everyone, and the man who made it happen: Sam [Farber], a delightful person to work with. He understood the business, but what was important was, he understood design. If he could have been a designer himself he would have been, but he …
In Projects to Products, Mik Kersten divides flow items in software products in four: features, defects, risks, and debt. If you only count features added and bugs fixed – changes visible externally – then you neglect the other outcome of our work: the next version of the team+software. I prefer to think of “technical debt” …
From The Grasshopper, by Bernard Suits: When you play a board game, or a game of baseball, you’re playing a closed game. There is a defined end, and a defined set of means to reach it. When you play pretend, or when you build a career in baseball, you’re playing an open game. The objective …
Feedback loops are essential to learning. In business, they’re essential to getting the product right. We need to know what the customers think, what they’re struggling with, what they value. There’s one department that has a lot of contact with customers. Whole conversations, where we can learn a lot about what frustrates people. Yet, customer …
Generativity is about caring about what comes after you. In a social context, it’s when old people care about subsequent generations, instead of maximizing their own happiness for the last few years. In business, it’s when executives care about the health and outcomes of the whole executive team, instead of their own career after this …
Every action has two results: a set of side effects on the world, and the next version of ourselves. I learned this from Erlang, a purely functional yet stateful programming language. Erlang uses actor-based concurrency. The language is fully immutable, yet the programs are not: every time an actor receives a message, it can send …
In most (modern) board games, there’s a phase where you build an engine, and a phase where you use that engine to achieve victory. This is not explicit, it’s just that in the first part of the game you choose things that give you more power, while in the last few rounds you maximize victory …
“Ideas don’t spring fully formed from the mind of an individual. Ideas emerge between people.” Avdi Grimm, in his closing keynote at Southeast Ruby, told how when he sets out to write a talk, he wants to go out on his deck and walk back and forth until he squeezes the ideas out of his …
Today in standup, a colleague reported that a GitHub isn’t sending the hooks it did last week, after we wrote code to handle it, and it’s a problem for us. “Did you contact GitHub?” “I asked around, and I heard they’re very unhelpful.” So no, he didn’t contact GitHub. The people writing that hook will …
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