Notes
Short pieces about how companies get stuck and what we've learned building things with them, from where the pain goes and what AI does to a company that hasn't looked at how it decides, to why we build ourselves out.
From the field
- The budget follows the problem to the wrong address.Unplanned money goes wherever a problem shows up, which is rarely where it is made.
- AI on top of an unclear decision makes the unclear decision faster.AI automates the written version of a decision, so where the real one happens somewhere else, it speeds up the muddle and hides it.
- A company is alive when it stops needing heroes.A hero carries by hand what the company's structure keeps dropping, so a hero marks the place where it has stopped carrying itself.
From work
- Nobody should pay for deep work up front.A company shows how it really works when someone fixes something in it, so the deep read should come out of one paid, concrete fix.
- A team sees what it is paid to see.Each team sees what it is measured and praised for, so what keeps getting missed sits in the gap between two teams' measures.
- Nothing is finished while it still needs the people who built it.Anything built for you is finished only when your own people can run it, handle the exceptions and change it without the builder.