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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Gene Kim
Started reading
May 6, 2020
was messy and imperfect, but the fact that they were quickly solving these problems gave Maxine confidence that they were on the right track.
Kirsten raises her glass. “My congratulations to you, everyone. And you did it all without even one project manager from my team, which makes it even better!”
“I’m delighted to be here to celebrate the successful Data Hub code push.”
“Every time we have an outage, we’ll be conducting a blameless post-mortem like this one. The spirit and intent of these sessions are to learn from them, chronicling what happened before memories fade. Prevention requires honesty, and honesty requires the absence of fear.
The only rule is that you can’t say ‘I should have done X’ or ‘If I had known about that, I would have done Y.’
Hindsight is always perfect. In crises, we never actually know what’s reallyl going on, and we need to prepare for a future where we have an equally imperfect understanding of the world.”
let’s go back to the Agile Prime Directive. No one is at fault. Everyone did the best they could, given what they knew. Let’s just stick with assembling the timeline. Maxine, please lead the way.” “My
We’re focused on enabling personalization and knowledge of current inventory to drive promotion.
She’s always been a prolific notetaker. She remembers reading somewhere, “In order to speak clearly, you need to be able to think clearly. And to think clearly, you usually need to be able to write it clearly.”
let’s burn the ships,”
they are now well past the point of no return, having torched the ships they knew how to sail.
the Unicorn teams still can’t get the data they need. It takes the Data Warehouse team four months to get twenty lines of SQL from Dev to QA to Production. And every time they do, reports break or show incorrect data.
the Data Warehouse is sitting on so many things they need.
proposing to build a Spark-like big data and compute platform, fed by an entirely new event-streaming bus, modeled closely to what the tech giants all have built to solve their data problems at scale. It would allow hundreds, even thousands, of CPU cores to be thrown at the computations, allowing analyses that currently take days or weeks to be done in minutes or hours.
enable developers to change things independently, without needing a centralized team to write intermediary code. And unlike the centralized Data Warehouse, the responsibility for cleaning, ingesting, analyzing, and publishing accurate data to the rest of the organization would be pushed into each business and application team, where they have the most knowledge of what the data actually means.”
support an immutable event sourcing data model,
for years, we’ve been handcuffed by the way everything has to go through the Data Warehouse team.
We’re just at the beginning of our real fight. We haven’t blown up the Death Star yet. Not by a long shot. It’s still out there. What we did today was we finally figured out how to fly our X-wings. Our world is still in grave danger,” she continues. “But we finally have the tools, the culture, the technical excellence, and the leadership to win the fight. I can’t wait for the next chapter to prove that we’re not a Blockbusters or Borders, Toys“R”Us or Sears. We’re in it to win it, not to be another causality of the Retail Apocalypse!”
You now need it at a much larger level, liberated from the tyranny of project management and functional silos.
more importantly, in every tablet app, we took out any question that slowed down the ability for our in-store employees to help our customers,
“It’s been true for hundreds of years and probably thousands more: employee engagement and customer satisfaction are the only things that matter. If we do that right, and manage cash effectively, every other financial target will take care of itself.”
there are some opportunities that could dramatically reshape the future of Parts
“The concepts of Horizons 1, 2, and 3 were popularized by Sensei Dr. Geoffrey Moore, who is most famous for his book Crossing the Chasm,
“Horizon 1 is your successful, cash-cow businesses,
because any profitable operation will attract competitors. The economic logic of selling reductions in transactional cost is irresistible and inevitable,” he says. “Which is why Horizon 2 lines of business are so important, because they represent the future of the company.
Sensei Dr. Steven Spear observed that for each day you can get to market faster, you can often capture upwards of millions of dollars of additional revenue. If you’re first to market, you will capture fifty percent of the revenue that the entire product category will ever yield. Second place will capture twenty-five percent, and third place will get fifteen percent.
“Speed matters. Or more precisely, lead time from idea to market offering matters,” he
Horizon 1 and Horizon 3 are often in conflict with each other.” He gestures at Sarah meaningfully. “Left unchecked, Horizon 1 leaders will consume all the resources of the company. They will note correctly that they are the lifeblood of the company, but that’s only true in the short term.
There is an instinct to maximize profitability and take cash out of the business instead of reinvesting it. This is the ‘manage to value’ thesis and is the opposite of ‘manage to growth.’ If you want growth, Steve, you must protect Horizons 2 and 3, and any learnings generated there must be spread throughout the company.”
“There are two ways to write code: write code so simple there are obviously no bugs in it, or write code so complex that there are no obvious bugs in it.”
She sees everyone turn toward her, some with expressions of hardened weariness and some with sympathy, as if she were a child who just discovered Santa didn’t actually exist.
As a company, we must show that we have a viable growth thesis and that we can create value in ways besides just cutting costs. By the book, there’s two extremes for how to run companies,
On one extreme, you have Alan and Sarah’s way of creating value, which is just by cutting costs. You squeeze every bit of margin you can out of the operation. Some companies thrive at this, and some manage to malinger for decades, but most eventually fade and disappear,” Steve explains. “But when you’re in this mode, you’re often just playing financial engineering games,” Steve says, gesturing at Dick. “In order to stem our losses, we’ve had to do a couple of asset sales to generate cash. But this can be like selling the furniture to pay the mortgage bill. Eventually, you run out of things to
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“The easier thing to do is to just do what the board says. But the right thing to do is ensure that the Innovation program has its shot. It sucks, but as leaders there should be no doubt that cutting deeper is the right thing to do, because it creates a potential path to long-term growth.”
“Sensei Moore observed that many businesses understand the Three Horizons but are still unable to properly invest in the next generation of innovation. In other words, they underinvest in Core, because they are being controlled by Context.
“Cores are the central competencies of the organization. These are things that customers are willing to pay for and what investors reward,” he says. “Context is everything else. It’s
technology must become a core competency of this company and, indeed, that the future of Parts Unlimited depends upon it. But how much of the $80 million of your technology spending is Core, actively building competitive advantage, and how much of it is Context, which is important and maybe even mission-critical, but still needs to be standardized, managed down, and maybe even outsourced entirely?”
You need someone who truly understands the business, someone hard-nosed who can drive standardization across the company, who truly has the best interests of the entire organization at heart, and who knows what technology can and can’t do.
Use for personal
Imagine what it could feel like to deliberately and carefully choose what to leave behind and where you could spend your time and energy instead.
“Those middle managers are your interface between strategy and execution,” he says. “They are your prioritizers and your traffic cops. We all have this ideal of small teams working independently, but who manages the teams of teams? It’s your middle managers. Some call them derisively the ‘frozen middle,’ but you’ll find that properly developing this layer of people is critical to execute strategy.
eliminate by value stream while maintaining flow. But when Bill talks about their desire
a new era where everyone was being paid not to just use their hands but also their heads.
The biggest risk I see is the operational risk from transitioning to these new systems. They’re Context, but they’re mission-critical. We’ve never changed this many business processes, let alone all at the same time. And I’m sure we’re going to have a bunch of very unhappy people who will come up with a bunch of reasons why we can’t.”
some of those objections are undoubtedly correct.
Maxine pictures Sarah sitting in the captain’s chair on the bridge of the starship Enterprise, grinning triumphantly with an all-new bridge crew, having completed her purge of the old guard. Maybe she’ll have all the heads of her vanquished foes mounted on posts to deter the next would-be rebels.
Would she reach all the way down into the engine room and purge all the redshirts who were associated with Kurt and Maggie? Normally she would have dismissed this idea as absurd.
If there’s anything I’ve learned managing salespeople, it’s that you never want to bring opinions when you’re playing a game that needs facts.”
As they say, two data points don’t make a trend, but it is still exciting to see.
“Rest assured, this is just the beginning.
an unexpected way of attracting great talent was through all the amazing new Parts Unlimited open-source projects that Maxine and the teams have created. Just like the tech giants, they’ve decided to open source various technologies that don’t create competitive advantage, and now many are becoming industry standards. For prospective engineers, the opportunity to work with the luminaries who created them is undeniably compelling.
