Wtf?

A modern technology engineering organization (or an entire organization like Amazon or Spotify) seeks to have high alignment and high autonomy. Everyone knows what the goal is, but they are empowered to find their own way to do it.

I found that Clayton Christensen, the author of The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution, had developed a framework that explained what I was observing. In a 2004 article in Harvard Business Review, he articulated “the law of conservation of attractive profits” as follows: “When attractive profits disappear at one stage in the value cha

Tellingly, Jeff Hammerbacher, who worked on Wall Street before leading the data team at Facebook, once said, “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.22 That

The fact that we are building financial products that no one understands is actually a reflection of the fundamental design of the modern financial system. What is the fitness function of the model behind its algorithms, and what is the biased data that we feed it?

The small teams are also a part of this approach. As is the design of a single, clearly-defined “fitness function” for each team (the one thing it promises to deliver, that can be measured and continuously improved).

A metaphor too is a kind of map; it may be all you have when you are first encountering a new territory shrouded in mist.

As the Internet speeds up the connection between human minds, as our collective knowledge, memory, and sensations are shared and stored in digital form, we are weaving a new kind of technology-mediated superorganism, a global brain consisting of all connected humans. This global brain is a human-machine hybrid. The senses of that global brain are t

We were all enthusiasts. Some of us were also entrepreneurs.

These sites didn’t just consist of a set of software programs. They consisted of massive amounts of data and the people and business processes used to gather, manage, and build ongoing services using that data.