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by
Jeff Lawson
Read between
March 15 - April 25, 2022
The digital revolution is fundamentally rewriting the rules of general management. Software simultaneously lowers transaction costs, demolishes barriers to entry, and accelerates the pace of change.
a legendary (though perhaps apocryphal) story in which Ernest Hemingway bet someone ten dollars he could write a whole novel in just six words and won the bet with this: “For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn.”
Building software is incredibly hard, and building a culture of digital innovation is even harder.
Company leaders who build industry-changing software products seem to do three things well. First, they understand why software developers matter more than ever. Second, they understand developers and know how to motivate them. And third, they invest in their developers’ success.
“Our business is not what’s in the brown boxes,” he said. “It’s the software that sends the brown boxes on their way.” We monetized our software not by selling it directly, but by selling everything else—books, DVDs, and CDs. What’s more, the quality of our software would determine whether we succeeded: “Our ability to win,” Jeff said, “is based on our ability to arrange magnetic particles on hard drives better than our competition.”
Jeff Bezos
Another way to think of this: Software has moved from being a cost center to the profit center.
Companies that adapt to the new digital landscape will serve customers better, and will survive. Those that don’t will die. It may not be overnight, but it’s inevitable. It’s as simple as that. It doesn’t matter what business you’re in.
Sure, you also have to deliver a great product or service at a competitive price. But in every market, the company with the best software will eventually win.
To truly thrive in the digital era—either as a disruptor or those fending off the disruptors—you need to think like a Software Person. Now, a Software Person is not necessarily a developer—it’s anybody who, when faced with a problem, asks the question: “How can software solve this problem?” That’s because being a Software Person is a mindset, not a skill set.
The less hardware you have to work around, the more software people can do their software thing.
Every kind of company can become a software company—all you have to do is internalize the value of rapid iteration.
Tech department decision makers might be fully aware that buying more off-the-shelf software is a terrible move.
In more agile cultures, failure isn’t punished. Instead, it’s a learning opportunity. The mindset of embracing risk and tolerating failure is a huge part of the software ethos. It’s also one of the biggest things that old companies avoid—even those with leaders who claim, as many do, that they want to become more like a startup.
If you want to become a software builder, you need to start by changing the mindset of the entire organization.
My rule of thumb is that for anything that gives you differentiation with customers, you should build.
let me repeat the rule of thumb again: anything that is customer-facing, you should build. Because you can’t buy differentiation. You can only build it.
This is how innovation works: experimentation is the prerequisite to innovation.
The more quickly and cheaply you can run experiments, the faster you’ll eventually find something that works. So I kept looking for ideas.
The superpower of software to me was how quickly you could take an idea and get it in front of customers. Once customers could play with your idea, they’d give you feedback, and tell you what was good and what was bad. That would inform the next thing you built, and so forth. You could release a new version every day if you wanted to. That iterative spirit is what makes software so powerful.
I’ve learned that building software is actually pretty easy but building the right thing is hard. So rapid iteration, experimentation, and close contact with customers are the prerequisites to innovation.
the key to getting businesspeople and developers to work well together is for the businesspeople to share problems, not solutions.
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
There has never been a better time to be a software developer. The only limit is your imagination.
“I’ve always thought that engineering is one of the most creative jobs in the world,” Amazon’s CTO, Werner Vogels, says. “Every day you get to create something new. Engineering is an extremely creative profession. Not all engineers are trained to become creative players. But it can be taught over time.”
“Forging something from nothing is where I get my greatest fire and energy. The moment someone tells me how to do something, or says, ‘These are the three things you need to do, and don’t worry about the big picture,’ that’s really demotivating.”
Chad Etzel
Share problems, not solutions with your developers.
When a developer is merely reading a specification document, they become isolated from the people who will use the software. The code becomes clunky and error prone because the developer didn’t know how people were going to use it. Not only that, but the act of writing the code takes forever because the developer feels no passion and has no intuition for how to get it done.
“Because unless you understand how things are put together, unless you know how the infrastructure is built, you have no idea how long it will take. I think that’s what sometimes causes a struggle between managers and engineering.”
Chad Etzel
If you’re actually inventing something, you shouldn’t know what you’re doing. —Caterina Fake, cofounder of Flickr
If you can try things in a low-risk way and quickly learn about your customers’ needs, why wouldn’t you? Rapid experimentation in software development is the most powerful aspect of Build vs. Die.
With experimentation and innovation, you can get better and better at it with practice.
“If you knew which ideas would be hits, of course you’d only do those. But of course, nobody knows ahead of time, so you have to be willing to plant a lot of seeds and watch them grow.”
Eric Ries
Writing it down, reminding people of the experiment’s purpose, and updating them on the progress is a great way to keep the experimental mindset alive and supported.
When you disprove a hypothesis, that’s a valuable learning that many would call a failure. But I would call it a success: when you reach a dead end quickly and cheaply, that’s valuable to the business.
Successful innovators know that the path to success may be lined with failed attempts.
Winston Churchill noted, “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”
It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do. —Steve Jobs
Daniel Pink argues that compensation isn’t necessarily what motivates people. Or it does, but only up to a point. Companies need only compensate employees to the point where they feel they are paid fairly.
Autonomy means the ability to work independently and not be told what to do. Mastery means the ability to get better at your craft over time. Purpose involves the feeling that the work you do actually matters.
you should pare the rules down to the minimum needed to create a system that works. As leaders, you do need to create a system where teams can successfully collaborate, where talent will be successful, and where your customers can trust you.
Creating a system of rules also means eliminating rules that aren’t needed.
Everybody has parts of their job they love, and parts they loathe, and developers are no different. So when a developer is in the drudgery of debugging legacy code or writing tests or waking up when the pager goes off—purpose is what makes these moments tolerable and even sometimes interesting. Knowing that customers and your coworkers depend on you, and that you’re changing the direction of your organization and those around you, is a powerful motivator. In fact, the more people who are touched by your work, oftentimes the greater the purpose.
To be a good recruiter you need to present your version of the Hero’s Journey. What do we do here? What challenges are we facing? Why is our work important? Why should you care about your job? What’s at stake? Why will you be excited to come to work every day?
Ability to contribute, or build mastery, autonomy, or purpose, is often the true root cause of somebody’s decision to move on.
When you stop learning, stop listening, stop looking and asking questions, always new questions, then it is time to die. —Lillian Smith
As a leader, deep down what do you really want? Do you want people to just blindly accept what you say, or do you want them to think for themselves and come up with the best solution to the problems at hand? In the moment of a discussion or a meeting, it sometimes feels like we wish people would just do what we told them because it’s easy to fall in love with our own ideas.
An open, learning environment is one where the organization is receptive to not having all of the answers, is comfortable with uncertainty, and strives to get better every day. It means being flexible instead of rigid, and having a culture where people continually seek the truth.
Well, business decisions shouldn’t be about anybody’s opinion. People have hunches and instincts. Just theories, really. But those theories need to be tested. And that’s where you need an openness to learning—and learning quickly.
Constructive criticism isn’t about tearing people down; it’s about helping them get better. It’s actually a form of respect. And it’s how people learn.
“We’re not perfect, but as long as we’re learning and improving, we’re doing good work.”
