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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Scott Berkun
Read between
December 7 - December 8, 2021
The very idea of working remotely seems strange to most people until they consider how much time at traditional workplaces is spent working purely through computers. If 50 percent of your interaction with coworkers is online, perhaps through e-mail and web browsers, you're not far from what WordPress.com does. The difference is that work at WordPress.com is done primarily, often entirely, online.
Since location is irrelevant, Automattic, the company that runs WordPress.com, can hire the best talent in the world, wherever they are.
Recruit from anywhere instead of fighting your competitors for talent in a handful of superstar cities.
No technique, no matter how good, can turn stupid coworkers into smart ones. And no method can magically make employees trust each other or their boss if they have good reason not to.
Most people doubt online meetings can work, but they somehow overlook that most in-person meetings don't work either.
In-person meetings are just as distracting, ineffective, and unproductive as Zoom (or Webex or Teams or whatever) meetings.
Making good ordered lists is the fundamental thing any effective leader does, and it's the heart of popular planning methods like Kanban and SCRUM.
The way a P2 worked was simple and clever (it was similar to Basecamp, a communication tool made by 37signals).
Communication at Automattic was roughly broken down as follows: 1. Blogs (P2): 75 percent 2. IRC: 14 percent 3. Skype: 5 percent 4. E-mail: 1 percent
P2s were much more than just for documenting meetings. Brainstorming, bug reports, discussions, rants, and jokes all found their primary home on the more than fifty-six P2s across the company. Several central P2s for human resources and a social P2 for watercooler-type conversations were also created, the latter becoming one of the most active.
What good is something that scales well if it sucks? Why is size the ultimate goal or even a goal at all? If you're the kind of person who loves Seaside or the place where you work, you don't need it to be any bigger than it is. The inability to scale is one of the stupidest arguments against a possibly great idea: greatness rarely scales, and that's part of what made it great in the first place.
Because Automattic is a distributed company, the meet-up has great significance: it's the only week all year that all employees are in the same place.
Since WordPress.com is a service, it can be updated any time, day or night. The burden of deciding when to launch something is on the maker, not a marketer.
The general work flow at Automattic had seven steps: 1. Pick a problem. A basic problem or idea for WordPress.com is chosen. It could be something like, “It's too hard to print blog posts,” or, “Let users share from WordPress to Facebook.” There are always hundreds of ideas and dozens of opinions about which ideas are important. There's no formal system for deciding, but many came from Mullenweg or as suggestions from the Happiness folks. After an idea is chosen, discussion begins on how it should work. 2. Write a launch announcement and a support page. Most features are announced to the world
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3. Consider what data will tell you it works. Since it's a live service, learn from what users are doing. The plan for a new feature must consider how its positive or negative impact on customers can be measured.
4. Get to work. Designers design. Programmers program. Periodically someone checks the launch announcement to remind everyone of the goal. As more is learned about what's possible, the announcement becomes more precise. Sometimes the feature pivots into something different and better. 5. Launch. When the goal of the work has been met, the feature launches. It's often smaller in scope than the initial idea, but that's seen as a good thing. The code goes live, and there is much rejoicing. 6. Learn. Data is captured instantly and discussed, often hourly, by the folks who did the work. Bugs are
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the power of simplicity. A simple process affords three things: 1. It is easy to launch projects. 2. If it's easy to launch, small projects will get launched. 3. If small things are launched, there is a fast feedback loop about what worked and what didn't, which can be quickly improved because of #1. The fundamental mistake companies that talk about innovation make is keeping barriers to entry high. They make it hard to even try out ideas, blind to how much experimentation you need to sort the good ideas from the bad.
Books about the future of work make the same mistake: they fail to look back at the history of work or, more precisely, the history of books about the future of work and how wrong they were.
no matter how much advice you have, you must still decide intuitively what to use and what to avoid.
While few established companies can choose to become completely distributed, the distribution of Automattic, among its other interesting attributes, begs the question: What assumptions do you have about your organization that hurt you? And what experiments are you doing to discover them and find better ways to work?
text was more popular than voice: text chat leaves both parties free to do other things.
by regularly fixing small things, you prevent bigger problems from starting. It's similar to the platitudes “nip it in the bud” and “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Many open source projects espouse similar philosophies, but in practice it's a challenge since few enjoy picking up other people's trash.
At WordPress.com something shipped every day. Often it was something small like a bug fix or minor improvement, but it was new nevertheless.
