Paying the predictability tax.
February 24, 2019.
The core observations from Fred Brook's The Mythical Man Month is that assigning more folks to work on a project often slows down delivery. Part of that is the predictability tax.
Valuing already-solved problems.
February 23, 2019.
Lately I’ve been thinking about how product market fit for infrastructure products is less about the company’s current state, and more about the state of the company when they first encountered the problem. Sure it would be excellent to sell your new platform to that enterprise company, but if they encountered this problem when they were much smaller, then they’ve already solved it.
Why limiting work-in-progress works.
February 17, 2019.
Several years ago, my friend Bobby showed me an article about a CEO who used systems thinking to understand their company's bottlenecks, which eventually lead to him buying out his cofounder, who had been leading their sales team. As is the case for most stories about ourselves that we decide to publish widely, this decision turned out to be the right one, and their business flourished.
Binder for hosting Jupyter notebooks.
February 10, 2019.
A while ago I wrote about modeling a hiring funnel as an example of creating a system model, but that post doesn't explore how the process of evolving a system model can be helpful. This post does.
Writing a reliability strategy: reason about complex things with system models.
February 9, 2019.
A while ago I wrote about modeling a hiring funnel as an example of creating a system model, but that post doesn't explore how the process of evolving a system model can be helpful. This post does.