Hey!

Welcome back to another week of musings.

We finally moved! So we're spending the long weekend unpacking boxes and organizing everything around the apartment.

I hope you had an uneventful weekend and managed to rest!

Was this forwarded to you? You can subscribe here!

Things I enjoyed in the past week

• pith notebooks, especially the Yuzu
• The best dark mode toggle is probably none
• TBM 438: Am I the Only Weirdo in This Company?

We recently went through a re-org at work (i.e., layoffs), and as part of that, we formed new teams.

Layoffs bring up a lot of emotion for everyone involved. Those of us who remain have to see this as new opportunities. How can we reshape how we see the product and ourselves?

If you've found yourself in "design" meetings long enough, or in a meeting that ends up debating too much in the weeds, you might have heard the phrase "let's take it back to first principles".

Usually, those phrases are as generic as "let's avoid boiling the ocean" and are used to divert discussions. Anyhow, my point is more that there's some truth, or rather, there might be useful ways to use them.

I was thinking of first principles as we form new teams, and with fewer people, we want to think of more effective ways of working. This means starting from scratch: why does this team exist, and what is the end goal? What do they provide?

This is usually tied to your software development lifecycle (in the case of tech companies). You would want to start with a Value Stream Map and determine where you spend more time than in other phases, and what needs to be unblocked to improve efficiency.

Work may be delayed for technical reasons, but it can also be delayed for cultural reasons, like unmet expectations or people wanting to keep old work mental models that don't work in the new context. Sometimes even saying no is hard for some teams, and they accept all incoming work, letting their actual bandwidth implicitly say no.

In the end, first principles work in this new beginning of sorts because, while each team brought a backlog into the merge, this new team also has emergent properties that let it rethink its ways of working.

Your turn

Let me know what you think of starting again from first principles. Have you ever done that? Let me know your thoughts by replying to this email!

Happy coding!