Love to see these updates from the German Digital Service. Not sure everybody knows that that organization exists now and what they’re busy with.
The work they’re doing is really good but what’s really staggering is how much of a gap they have to bridge here. These are basic buildings blocks of digital transformation that advanced societies tackled 10-20 years ago.
We’ve mapped our metrics and levers in Double Loop as a platform org and are now seeing this approach spread through the company.
Daniel explains here how you can use their tool to operationalize strategy and systems thinking.
https://blog.doubleloop.app/strategy-systems-thinking-and-being-wrong/
Leuke aflevering met Menno en Wimer over de lange en rijke geschiedenis van hun bureau Booreiland en de volgende stap die ze nu zetten.
https://www.studiogeorge.nl/degebakkenperen/booreiland-clarify
The Engineering Enablement podcast has been good to listen to—if a bit anodyne. The recent episode I listened to with Jeremiah Lee about Spotify’s massively popular but failed org structure was really fun and useful.
Leadership abhors a vacuum.
Complaining is easy. Learning how your organization works as described here by Cindy Sridharan is hard. Which of the two do you prefer to do?
- The mirage of aspiration
- Know how your org works
- Soft skills are hard skills
- Understand implicit hierarchies
- Cultures: top-down, bottom-up and both
- Get comfortable with the ‘mess’
- Look for small (and any) wins
- Understand org constraints and manage your expectations
“Get comfortable with the ‘mess'” and I can let you in on a small secret: everything is a mess.
I love this quirky website, The Kool-aid Factory and its dynamic publications about company culture and coordination.
An article by Victor Rentea that offers a mature and pragmatic perspective on clean architectures where developers too often tend to over-abstract.
I usually say: “Premature abstraction is the root of all evil.”
https://victorrentea.ro/blog/overengineering-in-onion-hexagonal-architectures/
A great and opinionated list of what healthy teams do by Hà Phan:
https://hpdailyrant.medium.com/what-a-healthy-team-looks-like-637e63e30edb
“This may surprise you, but continuous deployment is far and away the easiest way to write, ship, and run code in production. This is the counterintuitive truth about software: making lots of little changes swiftly is infinitely easier than making a few bulky changes slowly.”
Maybe this is counterintuitive, but ask yourself: Who has the time to manually test and release changes to production at scale? That’s right: nobody.