đź’ˇ Building Engineering (and more)
Building Engineering
This is a really great post by Ben Werdmuller. On the surface it’s about Building Engineering, but it’s mostly about good leadership and how to build successful products. I very much agree with his conclusion:
The most interesting and successful organizations have an externally-focused human mission and an internal focus on treating their humans well. That’s the only way to build technology well: to empower the people who are doing it, with a focus on empathy and inclusion, and a mission that galvanizes its community to work together.
There’s some great advice throughout, so I recommend reading the whole thing!
The Consensus Fallacy and the Need for Alignment
Josephine Conneely shared some thoughts that might seem controversial in The Alignment Fallacy. The basic premise is that the need for full alignment within a team can sometimes hide some deeper problems within an organization:
The need for complete explicit agreements in organisations can reveal a culture which requires you to be on defense (a cover your a*s culture if you will). Alternatively, it can be driven by a culture which suffers from being too collaborative (it happens). Plans which require committee approval get delayed, often never quite leaving that committee discussion stage. Broad stakeholder alignment is a positive thing that should be strived for but there can be limits. High risk, high reward scenarios rarely get complete agreement up front. Instead, they require someone to step up and commit to pursuing that path.
I agree with this take in general, with some nuances I would add to the language. I see alignment as a communication outcome that should happen in any decision-making culture, whether it’s consensus-driven, command-and-control, collaborative, etc. I would say that the situation Josephine describes in the quote above is an issue with relying too heavily on a consensus decision-making style. Importantly, consensus doesn’t necessarily guarantee alignment. How many times have you walked out of a meeting where everyone agreed on a thing and then the next day you’re surprised because it feels like you agreed to a completely different thing?
So I would maybe tweak the language slightly and say the post is a warning against consensus cultures. Alignment is a separate step from the actual decision being made, and an important one. It aims to make sure everyone understands (1) what decision has been made, and (2) what the consequences/next steps of the decision are. That’s needed no matter what your decision-making culture is.
The meek inherit the earth
Austin Kleon has a really interesting post on the word “meek” in the Beatitudes. In short, “meek” doesn’t mean “weak”:
Meekness as a habit of calm attentiveness, stillness, freedom from the fretting worry of keeping control, a stillness that allows others to feel welcome around you, can appear as something very different from the shrinking back that the word so easily suggests. If anger is very much to do with the “pushing out and pushing away” element in our psyche, “meekness” in the sense of a welcoming stillness is the opposite of this.
That definition reminds me of my earlier post On kindness and decisiveness. I should’ve thrown a “meek” in there!
The shame of LinkedIn
I found the article I Asked Experts for Tips to Navigate LinkedIn’s Cringe Factor surprisingly helpful, not just for its advice but also because it articulates well why LinkedIn can feel so weird sometimes:
LinkedIn users are trapped in a culture of professionalism and all that comes with it. The person you are with your boss or a client is probably not your truest self. This setting makes posting — or even just creating and maintaining a profile — feel extra high-stakes and, in turn, contrived. On LinkedIn, there is no dancing like no one’s watching.
Also:
The goal for most people on LinkedIn is not to be a creator, it’s just to live to fight another day in the working world.
In other interesting LinkedIn news I was going to link to earlier, also see Facebook and X gave up on news. LinkedIn wants to fill the void:
Finding a home for news publishers in 2024 isn’t about finding a perfect fit, but rather finding one that’s close enough. The traffic fire-hose days of the 2010s aren’t coming back. And LinkedIn is not the secret to infinite page views. But it might be fertile ground to build an audience with manageable issues.
Building Brex 3.0, March 2024
I wouldn’t want to work in an environment like this because even though delivery is a fun part of building product, I find that for most PMs it’s so much more fulfilling (and you usually get better results!) when they are part of strategy and discovery as well. That said, I’m now long enough into this product journey to recognize that as long as you have a team of people who love execution and are excellent at it, this is a completely valid way to build a company:
We changed this model with Brex 3.0. We killed our planning process, and now have One Roadmap for the entire company. I [Brex CEO] am the ultimate editor of everything that ships. We release 4 times a year, and each release has no more than 3 big themes. This forces me to choose what truly matters, allowing us to make a large, company-affecting investment in the few things that are step-function changes to the customer experience, and drop everything else.
Basecamp works in a similar way, and it works for them. I do appreciate that both companies are honest about how they work, so PMs know what they’re in for and what’s expected of them. The frustration only sets in if PMs think they have some autonomy over their work, and then slowly find out about the “shadow roadmap” they weren’t aware of. Just bring it all into the light, I say.
Thanks for reading Elezea! If you find these resources useful, I’d be grateful if you could share the blog with someone you like.
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PS. You look nice today 👌