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.
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.
Notes on Soul of a New Machine, Messy Middle, Crazy at Work, Company of One.
February 2, 2019 Every year or two I spend a month or two reading some general business and management books. On average, these are not my favorite books, but they usually have a couple interesting ideas and are imminently skimmable. Recently I've read through The Soul of a New Machine, The Messy Middle, It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work, and Company of One.