Rules of thumb for org design.
March 17, 2019.
While writing 'How to evolve an engineering organization', there were a bunch of org design rules of thumb that are interesting to discuss but didn't fit into the article well, so I've written them up here instead.
How to evolve an engineering organization.
March 5, 2019.
I recently had the opportunity to present to a small group of early-stage founders about evolving their engineering organization as their company scaled. While preparing, I realized that the most relevant piece I've written about organization design was about running reorganizations.
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.