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My goal is to structure teams around minimizing “coordination headwind,” as described by Alex Komoroske in this deck on seeing organizations as slime mold. The rough idea is that coordination costs (caused by uncertainty and disagreements) increase with scale, and adding managers doesn’t improve things. People’s incentives become misaligned. People... See more

Lenny Rachitsky • How Perplexity builds product

A GOOD PLACE TO WORK

Ben Horowitz • The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

When cognitive load isn’t considered, teams are spread thin trying to cover an excessive amount of responsibilities and domains. Such a team lacks bandwidth to pursue mastery of their trade and struggles with the costs of switching contexts.

Matthew Skelton, Manuel Pais • Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

Self-managed teams are not just tiny curiosities. They can manage vast international operations of great technical complexity. The practices are not only scalable, unlike bureaucracy, they are scalable without sclerosis.

Bas Vodde • Large-Scale Scrum: More with LeSS (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Cohn))

Self-management: For people who join from traditional hierarchical organizations, self-management can be puzzling at first. A training program can help with understanding how it works, what is different and what stays the same, what skills are needed to thrive in such an environment, and so forth.

Frederic Laloux • Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness

the technology transition has been moving from cost and efficiency to speed and adaptability (of course, customer value is everyone’s primary fitness function). This transition is illustrated by an article and a book published 10 years apart. In 2003, Nicholas Carr wrote a controversial article in the Harvard Business Review titled “IT Doesn’t Matt

Jim Highsmith • EDGE: Value-Driven Digital Transformation

Team ownership also enables a team to think in multiple “horizons”—from exploration stages to exploitation and execution—to better care for software and its viability.

Matthew Skelton, Manuel Pais • Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

many practice groups continue to maintain expertise-based approaches to running their affairs when their marketplace is probably closer to the efficiency stage.

David H. Maister • Managing The Professional Service Firm

An early lesson I learned in my career was that whenever a large organization attempts to do anything, it always comes down to a single person who can delay the entire project. An engineer might get stuck waiting for a decision or a manager may think she doesn’t have authority to make a critical purchase. These small, seemingly minor hesitations ca