Bill Parcells:

The only way to change people is to tell them in the clearest possible terms what they’re doing wrong. And if they don’t want to listen, they don’t belong on the team.

Those turnarounds taught me a fundamental lesson about leadership: You have to be honest with people—brutally honest. You have to tell them the truth about their performance, you have to tell it to them face-to-face, and you have to tell it to them over and over again. Sometimes the truth will be painful, and sometimes saying it will lead to an uncomfortable confrontation. So be it. The only way to change people is to tell them in the clearest possible terms what they’re doing wrong. And if they don’t want to listen, they don’t belong on the team.

Andrew Harmel-Law:

The moves in software delivery towards ever-increasing team autonomy have, in my mind at least, heightened the need for more architectural thinking combined with alternative approaches to architectural Decision Making.

Ensuring our software teams experience true autonomy raises a key problem: how might a small group of architects feed a significant number of hungry, value-stream-aligned teams? Why? Because in this environment Architects now need to be in many, many more places at once, doing all that traditional “architecture”.

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The Rule: anyone can make an architectural decision.

The Qualifier: before making the decision, the decision-taker must consult two groups: The first is everyone who will be meaningfully affected by the decision. The second is people with expertise in the area the decision is being taken.

Yaniv Bernstein:

Once I took on board that it was my job as an engineer to actually deliver impact, provide value, then I became a lot more engaged with my cross-functional partners.

A look at some manager onboarding processes.

Good technical design decisions are very dependent on context. Teams that regularly work together on common goals are able to communicate regularly and negotiate changes quickly. These teams exhibit a strong force of alignment, and can make technology and design decisions that harness that strong force. As we zoom out in a larger organisation an increasingly weak force exists between teams and divisions that work independently and have less frequent collaboration. Recognising the differences in these strong and weak forces allows us to make better decisions and give better guidance for each level, allowing for more empowered teams that can move faster.

The Curse of Knowledge describes the cognitive bias or limitation that makes it very difficult for humans to imagine what it would be like not to possess a piece of information, and hence to properly put themselves in the shoes of somebody with less knowledge than them.

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The first, and most important, is to overcommunicate. What exactly is meant by overcommunicating? To me, it is two things: (1) repeat your key messages a lot more often than seems reasonable or comfortable; and (2) when in doubt about whether your audience has a particular piece of important context, always err on the side of providing that context.

Overcommunication may seem inefficient but when it comes to communication, robustness is far more important than efficiency. Remember that the costs are asymmetric: communicate too much and you pay the cost of small amounts of wasted time, but communicate too little and it could lead to major disasters.

When you’re shaping an org in practice, the work you’re doing usually decomposes to manipulating three levers: structure, incentives, and culture (or, as Andy Grove puts it ‘contractual obligations, economic incentives, and culture’). A good org designer knows that they must pay attention to the interplay between all three elements.

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I bring up the interplay between structure, incentives and culture because I think highlighting this interplay serves one other purpose: it enlarges the discourse around org design. If you focus on org structure alone, every solution to an org design problem is necessarily a restructuring. This is unrealistic. And, from experience, there are whole classes of problems that may be patched by a change to an incentive system or via a tweak to org culture instead.

The philosophy of games, why we play them, and how it relates to modern polarisation and conspiracy theories.

Breaking non-fiction books down into three kinds with advice on how to read them.

A look at how Etsy tailored their search results to individual customers.

Eugene Yan:

Rule #1: Don’t be afraid to launch a product without machine learning.

Machine learning is cool, but it requires data. Theoretically, you can take data from a different problem and then tweak the model for a new product, but this will likely underperform basic heuristics. If you think that machine learning will give you a 100% boost, then a heuristic will get you 50% of the way there.

To recharge themselves, individuals need to recognize the costs of energy-depleting behaviors and then take responsibility for changing them, regardless of the circumstances they’re facing.

The article covers four dimensions of energy: body, emotions, mind, and spirit.

George Fairbanks:

There are two parts to software development: creating a design and expressing it as code. The code is tangible but the design is conceptual. Keeping a project healthy means doing both well. Here’s my concern: whenever you mix the conceptual with the tangible, it’s easier to neglect the conceptual. When you miss a tangible target, it’s obvious, but when you miss a conceptual target, you might not recognize it, or might rationalize that, because it’s impossible to measure, you were really quite close.

Blindly applying a factory process to software development will drive improvements to the tangible part (the code) at the expense of the conceptual part (the design). We see plenty of examples of this today, where teams have great feature velocity at first, are puzzled when velocity slows, and eventually the project is abandoned. As Cunningham warned, if we bolt features onto an existing codebase without consolidating those ideas into the code, the design will suffer, and over time “[e]ntire engineering organizations can be brought to a standstill under the debt load of an unconsolidated implementation.”

Casey Winters:

there’s one big thing that needs to change for wartime CPOs I want to cover today, and that is prioritization and evaluation.

Lara Hogan:

So, when a fraught issue arises, how can we help our organization move forward in a way that actually builds rather than breaks trust? Over time, and after many communication mistakes, I honed a four-part template, covering the following