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 …
Read moreDefine roles by what each person increasingly knows
Imagine you’ve never cut open a human body before. Nor seen a diagram drawn by someone who has. Back before anatomy textbooks, the organs and systems of the human body would not have been obvious. I imagine asking, what are the parts that make up a person? and getting: head, arms, legs, hands, feet, chest, …
Read moreThe visible lines of division are not the meaningful ones
Caring for software takes more knowledge than a single person can acquire. There’s the business knowledge that makes it useful, plus the languages and runtimes and infrastructure and deployment. Then there’s security, accessibility, user experience, each interface, availability, observability, scaling, performance, data modeling, testing, networking, etc etc. Every change to the software hits several of …
Every company, every team is its own system and works in its own ways. There are universal abstractions, but these are only useful when someone can translate them into the particular context of one company or team. Corporate anthropologists do this. First, they adopt the role of “participant observer.” They get deep into the context …
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 …
The magic of a gelled team is that they know how to work together, and together, they know how to do particular work. The members don’t know how to work together; the team does. These learnings don’t reside in the members individually, the learnings are in the interrelations. A shared know-how is jointly constructed between …
Maybe when companies make you do “team-building” activities, what they’re looking for is a phase transition into a gelled team. Because it is a sudden, magical thing, right? When a group of people turns into a team. Once you get there, to that feeling of team, it’s self-reinforcing. You trust each other, so y0u don’t …
Naturally intelligent systems do not passively await sensory stimulation. They are constantly active, trying to predict (and actively elicit) the streams of sensory information before they arrive…. Systems like that are already (pretty much constantly) poised to act. We act for the the evolving streams of sensory information that keep us viable and serve our …
Developers have a love-hate relationship with code re-use. As in, we used to love it. We love our code and we want it to run everywhere and help everyone. We want to get faster with time by harnessing the work of our former selves.And yet, we come to hate it. Reuse means dependencies. It means …
The other day in Budapest, Jez Humble and I wondered, what is the CAP theorem for teams? In distributed database systems, the CAP theorem says: choose two of Consistency, Availability, and Partitioning — and you must choose Partitioning. Consider a system for building software together. Unless the software is built by exactly one person, we …