I’ve come to believe that most organizational design questions can be answered by recursively applying a framework for sizing teams. Over the past year I’ve refined my approach to team sizing into a bit of a framework, and even changed my mind on several aspects, especially the viability of small teams. This post describes how I now size teams| lethain.com
Big Ball of Mud was published twenty years ago, and rings just as true today: the most prominent architecture in successful, growth-stage companies is non-architecture. Crisp patterns are slowly overgrown by the chaotic tendrils of quick fixes, and productivity creeps towards zero.| lethain.com
Most new things in technology turn out to be fads: patterns of talking and doing that come and go without leaving a permanent mark. Microkernels; EPIC architectures like IA-64; object request brokers; and 1990s’-style neural nets are gone, and will not return. Sorry for the deep throwbacks; only time proves which things are fads, so for uncontroversial…| Engineering at Slack
In small organizations, it’s easy for folks to be aware of what others are doing and to recollect how you’ve previously approached similar problems. This hive mind and memory creates a consistency to decision making that correlates strongly with quality. The subtle slide into inconsistency is often one of the most challenging aspects of evolving from a small team into a much larger one.| lethain.com
Standardizing on a given platform or technology is one of the most powerful ways to create leverage within a company: improve the tooling a bit and every engineer will get more productive. Exploration is, in the long run, an even more powerful force, with successes compounding over time. Developing an investment thesis to balance the ratios and timing of standardization and exploration is a core challenge of engineering strategy.| lethain.com
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.| lethain.com
Many effective leaders I’ve worked with have the uncanny knack for working on leverage problems. In some problem domains, the product management skillset is extraordinarily effective for identifying useful problems, but systems thinking is the most universally useful toolkit I’ve found.| lethain.com