Links: November 2022
Hello! As is customary at the start of every month, here are some of the best things I’ve read online in the last thirty odd days. While this newsletter is not a curated aggregator, I can’t resist sharing the *really* *good* stuff with y’all!
But first: Twitter looks to be about to start charging a monthly fee for being “verified”, and anyone can be verified. Here are my two cents on it, seeing it be so contentious and the most common pushback being that it will result in the Verified Badge losing its worth. Being verified has become a status symbol — not just on Twitter, but on pretty much every social network. And every platform takes a similar approach. Their Policy documents will call it “Notability” and will have rules on who is considered “notable”. However, a private company should not be the arbiter of notability — that is not what the term “verified” even means. “Verified” should simply mean whether the hosting platform can verify you are who you say you are. I’m happy to see this change. Among the things that will hugely benefit from having no gatekeepers (i.e. be truly decentralized), status amongst your peers is one of the most important. Also, remember when Whatsapp used to charge everyone $1 / year?
On with it!
OKR-driven organizations spend a lot of time in creating goals at every level that can be cascaded down or aggregated up. This is bureaucratic primacy — it makes things easy for the bureaucracy in reporting and managing. It results in the truly valuable goals and outputs becoming secondary. This is the main reason I dislike OKRs and this article dives into it very well.
Reasons to work on productivity and velocity
When talking about improving velocity of an organization, the most common objection I hear is that velocity is an “effect” and it is better to focus on the “cause”, like proficiency at something. However, in my experience, teams that want to go faster are able to go faster simply by having “fast” as a goal and working through every obstacle in the way of being fast. This is a great article about different aspects of productivity and velocity of engineering teams.
Blind spots created by your organization culture
Interesting Twitter thread by someone who worked on Google Glass and Lytro cameras on how certain elements of an org culture create massive blind spots and prevent the team from seeing important flaws in their product. This reminds me of Paul Graham’s famous exhortation: “Make something people want” — it seems so obvious and yet is so hard to do.
It has been 2 years and 8 months since the first Covid-19 lockdowns. How to go back to the office and the merits / de-merits of the different aspects remain a much debated topic with no clear answers. Elad Gil writes about some of the tactics he is seeing and which makes sense when.
Reminiscing: the retreat to comforting work
There is a saying in the corporate world that every general is fighting their last battle. This is more true than you think, and happens at all levels of the organization. If you find people doing something that isn’t very important but they think it is, this could be the reason. Good post on this behavior, how to recognize and how to limit it (it has its benefits!).
I haven’t been very prolific on here of late, but wanted to bubble up some popular posts, “in case you missed it”:
Shaping your organization culture early
The movie Arrival, linguistics theory and Dilbert come together in argument for paying close attention to the early tools and rituals of any new / growing organization.
The trope of influence-without-authority
On how Product Managers should think about authority and influence in practice — you actually have more authority than you realize, but you should use far less of it than you do.
Until next time!