A high-resilience org chart
If ya know how to do it, stick with the bureaucracy. If you’re building software, it’s always new — you need a generative org with a resilient structure.
agile
Those pesky pull request reviews
No one wants to review pull requests. This is a sign of a deeper problem than “people aren’t following the process”
Control from within
As a manager, I want to tell a team what I need and they make it. Is that too much to ask? It depends what you mean by “tell.” Without the information we need, work is like “Bring me a stone.” In this game, the Boss says to the Worker, “Bring me a stone.” The …
Software teams are like Executive Teams
In any large enough company, there are front-line workers, management, and executives. Executives set direction, management sets up the situation for the workers, and workers do the labor. Workers do the company business every day, providing capabilities to external or internal customers. Management gets them the tools and training they need, for today and for …
Code is a coastline
Code is like a coastline: the closer you look, the farther from here to there. Can we diminish this effect?
Aircraft Carriers and Paper Airplanes
What’s more valuable, a big old company with assets, or a small nimble company with ideas?
Stupidity can be a plus in corporations — but not in software development.
Functional stupidity is: don’t self-reflect, don’t ask why, and only think about what we ask you to think about. This can be good in corporate-land. It is a disaster for software.
Disincentives are more powerful than incentives
With increasing variety, each newly created incentive is weaker.
Yet disincentives get more powerful.
Grow to where we’re going
“Plants are movers…. Plants grow to where they’re going.” Frazier, P. & Jamone, Lorenzo & Althoefer, Kaspar & Calvo, Paco. (2020). Plant Bioinspired Ecological Robotics. Frontiers in Robotics and AI. 7. 10.3389/frobt.2020.00079. This is a keynote written originally for a private company. I’ll do it at conferences, including YOW! in September 2020. Short bite: In …
Define roles by what each person increasingly knows
Say you’re aiming for outcome-based product teams that write and operate software. Maybe you hire for roles in these teams like Software Developer, Product Owner, Designer, Tester. How do you define each role? We usually ask, what does each person do? A typical job description includes: what does the person do? What are they responsible …
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