Principles
The principles I try to live my life and lead by. Mixed bag of things I've grabbed along the way.
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People over process
Process exists to help people do good work. When it starts getting in the way of that, it's the process that has to change. A capable team that knows what it's trying to do needs far less of it than you'd think.
Echoes the first value of the Agile Manifesto (2001): individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
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Experts leading experts
The best leaders understand the work they lead. They can tell great work from work that only looks good, and they know when something is harder than it sounds. A manager who has never done the work can only manage the schedule.
One of the leadership traits in "How Apple Is Organized for Innovation", Harvard Business Review (2020).
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Small teams achieve more
Five people have ten lines of communication between them. Ten people have forty-five. Every person you add makes the team a little slower and the work a little harder to own. Keep teams small and give them the whole problem.
Related: Brooks's Law and Amazon's two-pizza teams.
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Strong opinions, weakly held
Form an opinion early and say it clearly, so there's something real to test and argue with. Then try to prove yourself wrong. When the evidence says you are, change your mind without making a big deal of it.
Popularized by futurist Paul Saffo, who described it as a forecasting method (2008).
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Wicked problems, patient work
The problems worth solving are messy. They're hard to define, they change while you work on them, and they never stay solved. No single clever idea will crack one. Progress comes from staying with it long enough to understand it.
"Wicked problems" comes from Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber (1973).
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Err on the side of do
When in doubt, do something. Most decisions can be undone, and waiting has a cost too. Doing teaches you things another round of discussion won't. Save the slow, careful thinking for the few decisions you can't take back.
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Fall in love with the problem, not the solution
Fall for a solution and you'll keep defending it long after it stops working. Fall for the problem and a failed attempt is one more thing you've learned about it. Know who has the problem, when it hurts and how they cope with it today.
The title of Waze co-founder Uri Levine's book (2023).
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Eat your own dog food
Use what you make, the same way your customers do. You'll find the rough edges before they do, and you'll fix them faster, because now they're your problem too. If you can't be a user, spend time with the people who are.
The term spread from a 1988 Microsoft email by Paul Maritz, "Eating our own Dogfood".
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Start with the experience and work backwards to how it's done
Decide what it should be like to use the thing before deciding how to build it. Start from the technology and you get a product shaped by whatever was easiest to build. Walk through it as the user first, then work out what it takes to make it real.
Steve Jobs at WWDC (1997): "You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology." Related: Amazon's working-backwards process.
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It's more fun to be competent
Being good at something makes work more fun. Hard problems turn into interesting ones, and you notice things you used to miss. That's reason enough to keep getting better, and to expect the same of the people around you.
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Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can
Cynicism and fear spread quickly through a team. So do optimism and kindness. Answering negativity with more of it only feeds it. When things get hard, stay positive and meet people with love.
Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love (1963). The line continues: "Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."
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Passion is how you achieve ambitious goals
Ambitious goals take longer and cost more than planned, and many of them fail. Skill and a good plan will get you started. What gets you through the slow middle, when nothing seems to move, is caring about the work and the people doing it with you.