SWLW #589: Conway’s Law in team topolgies, Futility of shortening iterations, and more

Like always, sharing my best findings for the week. 

 

This Week's Favorite

Conway’s Law in Team Topolgies: Did You Really Get It?
5 minutes read.

Fred Wynyk covers how your architecture and organizational structure influence each other. I find the missing part in engineering leadership, when considering architecture and org structure, is talking more about the business, product requirements and optimization factors. It's easy to stick to pure architecture (seemingly "good") traits and concepts without spending enough time understanding what the business is trying to achieve.

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Culture

New Employee vs Experienced Employee
1 minute read.

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

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Great Products Have Great Premises
7 minutes read.

What a wonderful observation on what makes great products. I started to look at the products I build and think of that framing (e.g. how does it work in B2B? how can I leverage that in side products, etc.): "A good premise gives you context. It sets the stage to make you more comfortable doing something that can be hard to do. A great premise gives you permission. It tells you it’s ok to do something that you otherwise aren’t even sure is ok to do."

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How Netflix Builds a Culture of Excellence: Interview With Elizabeth Stone (Video)
73 minutes read.

Elizabeth Stone, Netflix CTO, covers so many high-leverage questions. For example, how to hire and maintain a high bar for excellence (minute 39:09) - it's clear that they're not afraid of setting expectations very explicitly and clearly. Learning to understand your preferences as a company and attracting the talent that will flourish in such an environment is required to operate at large scale (people and systems).

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Futility of Shortening Iterations
3 minutes read.

Aviv Ben-Yosef makes this spot-on observation and calls it out: "The term “iterations” itself is a misnomer in this context. What we’re genuinely seeking are effective feedback cycles. Merely shortening an iteration from three weeks to one or transitioning to a Kanban system doesn’t inherently improve outcomes. In fact, there are several pitfalls to this approach."

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Peopleware

School Is Not Enough
12 minutes read.

"Agency is the capacity to act. Gaining agency is gaining the capacity to do something different from the rigid path of events that simply happen to you." -- Just as kids need to experiment with a few "jobs" to discover their preferences and develop that capacity (and yes, they can still "be kids"), adults should remember that learning doesn't end after high school or university.

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Be Alone Until You’re Valued. 12 Signs That You're Mentally Strong (Thread)
3 minutes read.

"You establish healthy relationships by avoiding toxic individuals. You surround yourself with like-minded friends who encourage growth and success. You maintain a positive attitude and don't let others' opinions affect you. You prioritize self-education by reading for at least 20 minutes each day." -- Reflect on this a bit. Maybe make a few small changes that could help you take more actions that generate energy rather than drain it.

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Year End Review
5 minutes read.

If you're using Google Calendar, you can use "Time Insights" to understand where you spent your time. Use Josie Bolotski's questions under "Part 3: Self-reflection" to see how you feel about your time investments.

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@ikirigin: If you pay employees $10k/mo and hesitate to pay $50/mo for anything related to productivity, you’re doing something wrong. Maybe it’s hard to trust the improvement in output. The solution is to trust people closest to the knowledge. So centralized software purchasing is dumb.

@Suhail: I find that the best meetings are either quite long (go deep) or extremely short (cut to the chase). Anything in the ~1 hour mark feels like it needed to be one or the other.



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.