More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
divide tasks into priority 1 (must have) and priority 2 (might be nice) items. I kept priority 1 as lean as possible. I took these lists over to a Google Doc spreadsheet, and for the remainder of the project, it was our scoreboard for how we were doing.
He was a star: unlike designers who shy away from the mess of engineering constraints, he did what the best designers do: he drove issues to resolution. And he did it with no ego, caring only about progress rather than credit.
Organizations become bureaucratic as soon as people define their job around a specific rule, or feature, rather than a goal.
Bureaucracies form when people's jobs are tied strictly to rules and procedures rather than the effect those things are supposed to have on the world.
The result is another data trap: the more complex performance reviews become, the less effective they are.
down. Many designers by their nature dislike conflict. Although they often have bold ideas, they struggle to find the courage to fight for those ideas. In a culture that emphasized camaraderie and sharing work, it was simply easier for designers, and everyone else, to avoid tough problems like ease of use and stick to the safety of fixing bugs or adding new features, even though new features contributed to the decline of simplicity.
In any organization, large projects require leverage, but few employees have any.
People who have grand ideas but little influence wonder why no one supports them. They think the lack of support is a judgment on their ideas rather than the politics of authority.
there were rarely big campaigns for new ideas or rethinking big assumptions. The short attention spans born from working online meant that P2 posts with grand ideas, ones that demanded deep thinking for the reader, were overlooked in favor of ones that were easy to respond to (a common occurrence in online discussions known as the bikeshed problem, or Parkinson's law of triviality).
When Mullenweg hired me, I promised periodic e-mails with observations about the company.
We should have a real issue priority system (pri 1 = wp.com down, pri 2 = data loss, etc.) since without it, all issue reporting is very subjective, and we default to “fix it now.”
We have a culture of tactical thinkers.
Example: I think our dashboard is pretty hard to navigate—it's huge and confusing now. But we have no way of discovering this is a problem (it won't appear as a ticket really), or identifying where the major pain points are.
Founder-centric companies, which most start-ups are, are a double-edged sword. The initial big ideas come from one person, which, if they are good, is fantastic for early growth. But as the company matures, the need for more people with similar courage increases.
A good sign as a leader is when output is high and meetings are short. This means all pistons are firing, there are few roadblocks, and things are on track with just a soft touch. It also means meetings can be used to stay ahead, flagging issues before they become blockers.
Managers often wrap their egos around meetings, and long meetings ensure they always feel that they're the center of attention, even if the meeting is a waste of time for everyone else.
Our time at Life of Riley gave us a new way to relate to each other and know each other better, something games do magically well.
Back in Athens, we had run into the project trap of postponing little things no one wanted to do to the end, when they cost more to do. But in Portland, despite starting from where we'd left off in Athens and working hard for days, we ran into the same trap again. We discovered the project trap is recursive: even when working within a list of postponed things, you still postpone things no one wants to do.
it was a special project twilight zone trap, the kind that occurs when cathedral ideas collided with bazaar practices:
With two days to go, I had to make sure we paced ourselves. It was another unspoken leader task: finding the sweet spot of breaks and meals to keep people productive without burning them out.
I'd learned that if I didn't make these warnings loud and enforce them by closing people's laptops, we'd work until someone was burned out, irritable, and starving, spoiling morale for the day.
The transition to managing a larger team reminded me that when everything is going fine, management is easy. Thousands of managers around the world inherit healthy teams in healthy companies, do little of merit, and get great rewards for just being in the right place at the right time.
The work of managers everywhere is rarely evaluated with enough consideration for the situation they inherited and the situations they faced that were not in their control.
It's small habits like these that shift a culture away from the pointless exercises of finger pointing and dodging blame and toward a contagious confidence that the best work of your career is possible right now. The feeling that there's nothing in your way is something few feel often in their careers, if they ever feel it at all.
One-on-ones. During the meet-up, I'd schedule time with everyone to talk in private. The conversation centered on the same four big personal questions I asked everyone in e-mail once a month: What's going well? What's not? What do you want me to do more of? What do you want me to do less of?
It's easy to get stuck in a place where you're not contributing much but are too scared to take big bets in such a new place. It was my job to pick up where their tour in Happiness left off.
1. Break assignments into smaller pieces 2. If there is no progress, go to #1 and repeat.
For Hugo the big discovery was comfort showing what he considered unfinished work.
They can try out ideas in sketches faster and cheaper than any other profession can. As a writer, I know exactly how limiting words can be to express ideas, and until Hugo's hiring, it was up to me to constantly sketch and mock up ideas others were discussing on our P2.
1. Everyone worked on new teams formed just for the meet-up. 2. Projects were picked by Mullenweg based on suggestions. 3. Every team would have a new lead, someone who'd never led before. 4. Each team had to present to the company on the last day. 5. The goal was to ship something before the presentation.
For all my planning, scheming, and influencing as a team lead, sometimes talent, chaos, and chemistry are all you need for good work.
We'd never be able to repeat sprints like this every week, but the thrill of trying so many experiments at once energized us all for months to come.
We all imagine an angel will fly down from the sky and let us know it's time to make that change we've had on our minds for far too long. But that angel never comes because that angel doesn't exist. It's a fantasy born of our lack of faith in our own ideas.
The last act of good leaders is to ensure things go well when they're gone. Many legendary leaders failed at this: Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, and nearly every monarch in history. As much good as they did in their reigns, most of it was undone by those who followed.
To offer Adams the job meant disclosing my leaving, and once that ice is broken, it's best to let everyone know quickly. No one should be expected to carry the burden of a secret their peers would love to know.
The next day Mullenweg tuned in to chat with us and answer any questions about the leadership change. To his credit, this is precisely the kind of kickoff any new lead deserves.
We pulled the most important feature ideas from our list on our P2, and discussed which ones best fit our goals.
Midway through the week, I pulled Adams aside to tell him it was time. If he was ready, we should announce he was in charge. It'd be great for everyone to see me following his lead as my role switched to being just an individual designer on the team.
Although we didn't write much code in Hawaii, our time looking at screens, talking, and debating the future, thinking broadly about WordPress instead of just about features, might have mattered more than any feature we'd ever launched.
The most dangerous tradition we hold about work is that it must be serious and meaningless.
Among those with souls and high-paying but empty jobs, there's a denial of how what they seek is hard to get in the way they're trying to get it.
With no universal measure for meaning to compare with the seemingly solid accounting for income, we fall into the data trap.
In the centuries of civilization prior, many more of us had crafts and skills that gave us pride.
It's a shockingly recent notion that work and play should be mutually exclusive things.
