Practice
Things I’ve learned
- Complexity never disappears. Decline to handle it and it lands on whoever has the least room to say no.
- Defaults are the experience. Most people never change one, so whatever it ships with is what they’ll have.
- Capacity comes before capability. A lot of what reads as resistance is somebody at the edge of what they can hold.
- Safety and trust
Trust is operational
Trust gets filed with the soft subjects, and then it turns up as a stalled rollout, a shipment nobody will release, and a team with no room for the thing you just asked them to absorb.
Read - The mechanism
Who carries the complexity
Every feature has an irreducible amount of complexity. The only question is who ends up holding it: the product team, the engineering team, or the person using the software.
Read - Information software
The view is the product
In software where people read, scan, compare and decide, the arrangement of the data is the product itself, and it repays the same care as the data model.
Read - On AI, and tools generally
Power-ups don’t pass levels
AI is a power-up, and it is still the player who passes the level.
Read - When code gets cheap
The part that doesn’t get cheaper
When execution gets cheap, shipping stops being the advantage. The scarce thing becomes knowing what is worth building, and closing the ambiguity around it.
Read - A diagnostic
The hypothesis ratio
A five-minute way to tell whether a build relationship is resolving ambiguity or returning it.
Read - How people actually use software
Eleven principles
The gap between how software gets built and how it gets met.
Read - Teams
Capacity comes before capability
We’d all like to think we have unlimited capacity for good things, and our nervous system disagrees.
Read - Leading
To lead is not to talk down to
The standard gets clearer when it’s said forward. “Please make sure this doesn’t happen” lands. “You let this happen” gets defended against.
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