Elezea: resources for product leaders - Human systems and the stuff they make
There’s so much goodness in Mandy Brown’s latest management post Made It, but it’s this paragraph that gets to the heart of it:
I have been thinking about human systems a great deal over the past few weeks. It started when I read Donella Meadows’s Dancing With Systems. When I applied that lens to my own work it was impossible not to see it in absolutely everything we do. Take this quote, for instance:
There are so many implications of this principle for the way we make software today. Here are a couple I’ve been thinking about in particular. QualityWhen we have quality issues in our product it’s tempting to try to solve those issues with process and overhead. Common ways to do that include instituting additional approval gates before code can be deployed to production environments, or adding “QA periods” where the entire organization is asked to test a feature before it goes live. These solutions optimize for parts of the system—such as deployments or manual testing—while ignoring the system that is responsible for introducing quality issues into the product in the first place. To quote Deming:
We have to look at the system as a whole. What kind of automated test coverage do we have? What bottlenecks exist in our CI/CD pipelines? What level of responsibility do we ask of engineers to be stewards of their own code? Do teams have enough time to make sure that quality is built in from the start and not an afterthought? These are the total systems properties questions that have to be addressed in order to fix quality issues. Team stabilityOne of the bigger leadership mistakes we make is to think that the humans that make up a social system are interchangeable and can be moved around at will without impacting the system as a whole. You see this especially in engineering teams where “resources” are constantly moved from one project to another—usually to speed something up that is perceived to be behind schedule. But we forget that it is the human system that produces the stuff, not the individuals. Similar to the discussion about quality, if we perceive a project to be off track we need to understand how the project came to be off track, and then find ways to improve the system to correct that. Did we place unrealistic deadlines on the team without getting their input? Are we asking teams to build features that have not been validated with customers? Do teams have adequate autonomy and ownership over the way they prioritize their work? Do teams have the business context they need to make the best possible decisions? If we instead go for the shortcut of moving people around, we will never get to the heart of the matter. Inserting additional humans into a system can inadvertently break it—and worse, moving folks from one project to another leaves a gap that is very likely to destabilize the project that they were working on before. Suddenly Customer Success doesn’t have an Engineer to talk to about documentation, or the Marketing Team doesn’t have anyone to fix an issue with a piece of demo software. Once again, Donella Meadows says this well:
Stable teams that work together for an extended period of time all have a steady beat, and we shouldn’t make changes to the system until we know exactly how that beat works. Here’s Donella again: “Before you charge in to make things better, pay attention to the value of what’s already there.” And that’s how all this connects to Mandy’s piece that I linked to at the beginning. If we want the stuff to be good, we have to pay attention to the beat of the system of humansthat make up an organization. We have to understand how they work, and we have to ask them how they want to work. We have to listen to the people who are beating the drums. It may sound a little counter-intuitive, but if we optimize for the humans who make up a system, the good stuff will follow. In the post How New Managers Fail Individual Contributors Camille Fournier makes a great point about the split between “managerial” and “technical” career tracks:
She goes on to to list five pitfalls that new managers should work to avoid in order to set their direct reports up for success. I have a few product-related articles that I wanted to reflect on and write more about, but I just don’t think I’m going to get to it. They’re all really good though, so instead of just archiving those notes I wanted to share them so you can check it out. 1.Here’s some solid advice from Jason Knight on what to do when your product is a mess and you have to fix all the things all at once:
And:
2.Andy Nortrup writes about what he learned about product management from Bonsai:
3.Rich Mironov talks about the differences between products and features, and I especially appreciated this point about what users care about:
Some Stray Links
|
Key phrases
Older messages
Engineering maturity models, the importance of setting context, productivity for monks
Tuesday, January 31, 2023
Also some weird-looking fake animals
Everyone's talking about meetings again
Tuesday, January 24, 2023
Also how Figma builds product
The Weekend Edition // 2023.1
Friday, January 20, 2023
Dialup sounds, the origins of “burnout”, and more.
A framework and method for developing a Product Strategy collaboratively (Part 4)
Friday, January 20, 2023
Also everything you didn't know about The Shining
A framework and method for developing a Product Strategy collaboratively (Part 3)
Tuesday, January 10, 2023
Also some thoughts on whether or not managers should be technical
You Might Also Like
The Invisible Wall Around Most of Manhattan
Tuesday, April 23, 2024
It's an "eruv"
🧙♂️ New mic I travel with
Tuesday, April 23, 2024
gunna take over the world now
Death of Followers Leads to Good Business
Tuesday, April 23, 2024
Who cares about followers? Entrepreneurs don't need to.
🍀 time to forage for inspiration?
Monday, April 22, 2024
How + why to find inspiration when it's been lacking. View in browser The first single from my new album, Patas de Problemas (Troublepaws) is out now! 😻 🎧 Check it out! Hi Reader, When inspiration
Under $10M to $80M per year
Monday, April 22, 2024
AppSumo's story How did Dropbox get to 100million users? How Dollar Shave Club went from $4million to $250million ARR in 4 years? How did Medium turn around Brand their brand reputation? How
When Show Business Met Monkey Business
Monday, April 22, 2024
Or, when morning TV went bananas
🧙♂️ "You're a sellout"
Monday, April 22, 2024
Don't let your audience turn on you
Optimistic ought to be a verb
Monday, April 22, 2024
Good morning ladies & gents, It's gonna be a good week. Optimism: now, always, and forever. Trevor I just bet $100 the CFPB will be ruled unconstitutional (website) Kalshi is my site of choice
Authors • 6 tweets/day • 33 days of Book Tweets Only $33 •
Monday, April 22, 2024
Tweeted 6 times daily for 33 days only $33 Logo ContentMo Tweets Your Book to Our Twitter Followers Each Day We TWEET Your Book for 33 Days, 6 Times/Day = 198 tweets Please enable images to view this
👨🚀 Astronauts' secret weapon for peak performance 🦾 AI of the week 🎯 Commitment and focus
Monday, April 22, 2024
Origins and benefits of the NASA nap. The world of humanoid robots and AI innovations. Reflections on Derek Sivers' compelling insights on focus and commitment, which challenge us to cut off