SWLW #518: Why goal cascades are harmful and what to do instead, The retreat to comforting work, and more.

Heya,

As always, below you can read my best findings for the week. If you want to support my work or join our SWLW community in Slack - scroll down to the bottom of the email to see how.
 

This Week's Favorite

​​Conway's Law
4 minutes read.

"The key thing to remember about Conway's Law is that the modular decomposition of a system and the decomposition of the development organization must be done together." -- Martin Fowler with a great post about Conway's Law and how you should think about it when you design the architecture and organization to serve the business needs.

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Culture

When You Choose KRs Poorly, but Achieve Really Impressive Results
1 minute read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face.

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Understanding Antifragility and Black Swans, and How They Impact to Your R&D Organization
8 minutes read.

"The key is to create a culture that promotes growth and learning from any shock and disorder — regardless of whether you anticipated it or not" -- Guy Grinapell captures it well. Staying positive and nurturing an environment that can look at failures as a learning opportunity is how you build that muscle.

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What a Healthy Team Looks Like
6 minutes read.

"If you hadn’t built it, you would never have thought of certain questions. Building is about showing, and showing is a lot more powerful than telling. The only caveat to building-to-learn is that the artifacts created should be quick, disposable, and preferably ugly, so that no one is attached to a beautiful useless thing." -- Hà Phan with such a powerful insight on "Healthy teams build to learn."

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Would You Leave the Cloud to Improve Sales Efficiency by 11%?
3 minutes read.

Tomasz Tunguz will get you to stop and think about your business and how you leverage the cloud to serve your customers. Is your business stable enough in some areas to benefit from moving out of the cloud? Do you have the skills and people to support a potentially hybrid solution? Given the recession and inflation, maybe now is the right time to optimize for efficiency.

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Peopleware

My Take on Why Goal Cascades Are Harmful and What to Do Instead
8 minutes read.

Jason Yip and John Cutler analyze and share their view and insights as you plan a new year. Cascading goals planning often has the same problems inherent in Conway's Law. I like how Jason puts it: "If collective goals matter, you need some way of creating coherence." Instead of optimizing for cascading goals, we should use top-level goals as a shared context. Very much like we're using the company's North Star. When parts of the organization come up with goals, they have to attach them to the business needs (current and future), leveraging any context they got to explain that. Why are we doing it? Why now? How does it help the company to achieve the North Star we agreed on?

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It's Not Surprising That Jasper (Vertical SaaS Powered by GPT3) Makes More $$$ Than OpenAI (GPT3 API). A Model Behind an API With Standard Pricing Basically Treats Every API Use Case as Having the Same Value. This Means the Model Host Suffers Suboptimal Value Capture. (Thread)
4 minutes read.

This is a great thread to get you thinking about how businesses leverage new technology. We can look at how Generative AI is being pushed to the market, how Open Source speeds things up and how big companies will play this game versus smaller startups.

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Reminiscing: The Retreat to Comforting Work
4 minutes read.

"Snacking isn’t necessarily bad, a certain amount gives you energy to redeploy against more impactful tasks, but you do have to be careful to avoid overindulging. [...] To catch my own reminiscing, I find I really need to write out my weekly priorities, and look at the ones that keep slipping. Why am I avoiding that work, and is it more important than what I’m doing instead?" -- What do you do to be mindful of the type of work you're taking on versus delaying? Will Larson's post made me think about the way I stay focused on the critical things while having enough "slack time" to avoid being overloaded.

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@JoshuaOgundu: Generative AI but for writing tickets in JIRA and PRDs

@shaig: ex-Stripe employee raising at $25M post, pre-seed, no team, no deck, notion page only. Nature is healing



p.s. if you're interested in joining SWLW's Slack channel, simply reply to this email and let me know. If you're leading a team, consider writing your Manager README (it's free) or getting my e-book and interviews Leading Snowflakes: The New Engineering Manager's Handbook. You can also support me by becoming a SWLW Patron. Thank you ❤️




Keep reading, keep learning.
-- Oren Ellenbogen.