execution
![Brian Piercy](data:image/svg+xml;utf8,<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 24 24" fill="%230A66C2"><path d="M20.447 20.452H16.89v-5.569c0-1.328-.027-3.037-1.852-3.037-1.853 0-2.136 1.445-2.136 2.939v5.667H9.351V9h3.414v1.561h.046c.477-.9 1.637-1.85 3.37-1.85 3.601 0 4.267 2.37 4.267 5.455v6.286zM5.337 7.433a1.982 1.982 0 1 1 0-3.964 1.982 1.982 0 0 1 0 3.964zm1.782 13.019H3.555V9h3.564v11.452zM22.225 0H1.771C.792 0 0 .774 0 1.729v20.542C0 23.227.792 24 1.771 24h20.451C23.2 24 24 23.227 24 22.271V1.729C24 .774 23.2 0 22.222 0h.003z"/></svg>)
It started with a cheese pull.
Building in consumer hardware as a software engineer
We’ve talked several times on this substack (as well as in my book), about the learning curve, the observation that costs of a produced good tend to fall by some constant proportion for every cumulative doubling of production volume: go from 100 to 200 units, costs might fall by 15%, go from 200 to 400, another 15%, and so on.
Starbucks ascended as a "third space." Maybe it should run like a 3PL.
Data without context is noise masquerading as insight. How many times have you sat in a board meeting where the marketing team reports a 40% increase in qualified leads while sales insists conversion has plummeted? Both teams are right, and both are wrong. Marketing measures MQLs based on email engagement and website behavior. Sales defines qualified leads as prospects with confirmed budget and timeline. The same company, the same quarter, two different realities.
When brilliant work leads to breakdowns
How to turn your time estimates into reliable predictions — and communicate them.
Number of designs that are late increases. Rapidly rising complexity is the leading cause, but tools, training, and workflows need to improve.
In leadership and life, ambitions often outpace our ability to consistently execute on them. A hidden hurdle that trips up many is their level of “frustration tolerance.” This is particularly true in large organizations that are literally designed to frustrate ambitions and agendas. In this piece, I unpack the critical
Binstack is a technique for selecting the "single most impactful" solution when there are multiple, incomparable dimensions to evaluate.
What I think about when I'm lead engineer on a project
Goodhart's Law is useless. It tells you about a phenomenon, but it doesn't tell you how to solve it. We look at how organisations actually prevent Goodhart's Law, and illustrate this with Amazon's Weekly Business Review as an example.
Sprints promise to accelerate development, but often do the opposite. Check out this alternative approach to building software.
How Danaher combines Lean manufacturing with masterful capital allocation to build a remarkable manufacturing company in the United States.
Your life choices aren’t just about what you want to do; they’re about who you want to be.
The United States leads the world in airline safety. That’s because of the way we assign blame when accidents do happen.
Two principles on collecting data, from the field of Statistical Process Control. As with most principles in SPC, this is both simpler and more important than you might think.
I've been involved in spacecraft and space systems design and development for my entire career, including teaching the senior-level capstone spacecraft design course, for ten years at MIT and now at the University of Maryland for more than three decades.
Book Review: Power Failure
It’s never going to win a James Beard Award. Or try to wow you with its foam experiments or ingredients you’ve never heard of. But it is the best-run, most-loved, relentlessly respected restaurant in America. And, oh yeah, Danny Meyer, David Chang, and Shaq all agree. Welcome to Hillstone.
Photo by Carl Heyerdahl on Unsplash Productivity in software development has always been tricky to...
I recently rewatched "The Wire". The show's central theme is about counter-productive metrics and their corrupting influence on institutions. I've noticed hints of this pattern in software engineering, too
What's SAP? And why is it worth $163B?
A deep dive into writing detailed planning docs from one of the most successful companies in the world
Note: With the arrival of my son, I’m slowing down on the blogging. Give me a couple months (or more sleepless nights), and I’ll be back…
This project you’re working on, the new business or offering, what sort of value does it create? Who is it for? What mindset and worldview and situation?Is it paid for by organizations or individua…
How do you get to market faster than the competition? How do you become more efficient without violating the laws of physics? How do you save time, money and frustration? It all comes down to decis…
Read the updated post, Art of the OKR Redux instead! A lot has changed since 2014…. Original “Art of the OKR” below, for archival purposes: I wrote a book on…
I spent some time recently thinking about what companies that grow up to be extremely successful do when they are very young. I came up with the following list. It’s from personal experience and...
Understanding what an Objective and Key Result is, why it's different from traditional goal setting, and what impact a good OKR will can have is vital.
I have wanted to write a review of John Doerr’s book Execution is Everything since it was first published five months ago. Some of you are probably saying right now: “That’…
When Germanwings Flight 4U9525 crashed into the French Alps in March it did not take investigators long to determine the likely reason: Co-pilot Andreas Lubitz had allegedly been suffering from depression and may have crashed the plane as a means to commit suicide, taking hundreds of people along with him. But that doesn’t tell the […]
I have recently been talking at small and mid-size companies, sharing engineering best practices I see us use at Uber, which I would recommend any tech company adopt as they are growing. The one topic that gets both the most raised eyebrows, as well the most "aha!" moments is the
What is Kanban? Learn more about how the kanban methodology of visualizing work in progress can accelerate your team’s improvement efforts and minimize waste
Don’t let progress end when the meeting does.
We go step-by-step through the making of Rihanna's song "Man Down." Bringing in top songwriters and producers costs tens of thousands of dollars. Trying to turn the song into a hit costs much more.
Report templates, and guided steps to create them, so Product Managers spend less time in status meetings and more time out of the building
Complete SEO Checklist to increase your website search rankings in 2015. Check off each item with the quick list or follow the comprehensive guide...
If you know nothing about OKRs, please start here: Art of the OKR. Or buy my book, Radical Focus. I think it’s rather good. An Objective is the goal you wish to achieve in a g…
The sprint is a 5-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing with customers. Learn to run your own sprints, and read about our book on sprints.
When “faking it before making it” actually works
This is a draft chapter from the second edition of Radical Focus. It’s coming… eventually. Hopefully soonish. Leave your wishlist for other topics you’d like it to cover, and enjoy the sneak peek! …
Failure mode and effects analysis is the process of reviewing as many components, assemblies, and subsystems as possible to identify potential failure modes in a system and their causes and effects. For each component, the failure modes and their resulting effects on the rest of the system are recorded in a specific FMEA worksheet. There are numerous variations of such worksheets. An FMEA can be a qualitative analysis, but may be put on a quantitative basis when mathematical failure rate models are combined with a statistical failure mode ratio database. It was one of the first highly structured, systematic techniques for failure analysis. It was developed by reliability engineers in the late 1950s to study problems that might arise from malfunctions of military systems. An FMEA is often the first step of a system reliability study.
Etsy COO Linda Kozlowski knows an operations leader is critical to the success of a company. Here, she sheds light on the most mysterious role in the C-suite — and how startups can hire and empower the right COO for their company.
I just spent a day working with Bob, the Chief Innovation Officer of a very smart large company I’ll call Acme Widgets. Bob summarized Acme’s impediments to innovation. “At our company we have a cu…
“My biggest surprise was when we launched the Facebook app and it didn’t go viral” -Startup CEO quote “The month after we ...
There have long been a few fundamental challenges associated with business process management. But a relatively new and innovative technology, process mining, has the capability to revitalize process management in firms where it has lain fallow for years. One problem involves the creation of “current state” processes — a description of how a business process is being performed today. In business process reengineering, organizations are primarily interested in an improved “to be” process, so often they have little interest in exploring “as is,” or how the process is currently performed. The other general problem with process management is the lack of connections between business processes and an organization’s enterprise information systems. Enter process mining. Process mining software can help organizations easily capture information from enterprise transaction systems and provides detailed — and data-driven — information about how key processes are performing. It creates event logs as work is done: an order is received, a product is delivered, a payment is made. The logs make visible how computer-mediated work is really happening, including who did it, how long it takes, and how it departs from the average. Process analytics create key performance indicators for the process, which enables a company to focus on the priority steps to improve.
One sector has an unfair number of elite product minds. These 9 habits are their underlying behaviors that result in product success.
Software developers don’t really like to make schedules. Usually, they try to get away without one. “It’ll be done when it’s done!” they say, expecting that such a brave, funny zinger will reduce t…
A popular goal-setting framework, Objectives and key results (or OKRs) are an effective method for planning and measuring success on a team level. They fall short, however, when companies attempt to apply them to individual contributors. Setting individual OKRs generally leads to goals that are either not true indications of meaningful progress or that are easily gameable. Instead, individual contributors should be assessed based on the extent to which their work contributes to team goals that add real value to the company and its customers.
The acronym OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results. Much has been written on the topic over the years yet they still remain a mystery for
Before joining Wave four years ago, I spoke to a former employee about his experience. He said something that has stayed in my memory ever since: “Wave is really good at execution, so by working at Wave, you’ll learn how to execute very well.” Now that I’ve been here a while, I thought it would be good to write down what really good execution actually looks like in practice and the counterintuitive lessons I’ve learned along the way.
New research reveals that how we perform work as a team contributes more to resilience than external stressors. On resilient teams, individuals feel responsible for energizing each other. This is in stark contrast to teams who are challenged by frustrating ways of working and fractured relationships. As we move into the third year of pandemic uncertainty, adopting three simple practices will help managers build more resilient — and re-energized — teams.
In 2017, I went to Facebook on a sabbatical from my faculty position at Yale. I created a team to build a storage system called Delos at the bottom of the Facebook stack (think of it as Facebook’s version of Chubby). We hit production with a 3-person team in less than a year; and subsequently scaled the team to 30+ engineers spanning multiple sub-teams. In the four years that I led the team (until Spring 2021), we did not experience a single severe outage (nothing higher than a SEV3). The Delos design is well-documented in two academic papers (in OSDI 2020 and SOSP 2021). Delos is currently replacing all uses of ZooKeeper at Facebook.
All things being equal, speed will determine whether your company succeeds or not. Here's how to make it core to your culture.
The 'Mythbusters' star and author of the new book 'Every Tool's a Hammer,' explains the magic of the colored-in checkbox.
When I first started working on Typesense six years ago, I set myself a simple rule: I shall write some code everyday before or after work. That’s it. No deadlines, no quarterly goals, no milestones. I did not have a choice really — I was about to get married and was already working full-time in a demanding role. As you can imagine, building a search engine from scratch is not a trivial undertaking, so that was my way of not having to deal with additional stress.
This Nano Tool for Leaders offers guidance for creating a culture of continuous performance improvement and adaptive learning by systematically reviewing team successes and failures.…Read More
An open letter from a former Facebook and VMware engineering executive on how startups can best structure their release processes.
When we find ourselves in endless debates where everyone defends their idea, we don't know how to handle the situation. We eventually find a way out, but what we need is an excellent system.
Efficacy, effectiveness, efficiency… These terms sound confusingly similar. Commonly used in medical research, project management, and decision science, they are often mixed up in everyday conversations. If you’re in a hurry, here’s the difference: Efficacy means getting things done Effectiveness means doing the right things Efficiency means doing things right Sounds confusing? Don’t worry, I ... Read More
The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right [Gawande, Atul] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right
Leaders need to lead by example using OKRs, showing that they are equally as committed to successful outcomes as anyone on the front lines of the business.
Done right, GIST keeps the team, management and stakeholders aligned on the why (goals), what (ideas) and how (steps and tasks), and every task we execute is connected to a business goal. A full quarterly plan creates a GIST tree per goal:
A seemingly silly gesture is done for the sake of safety.
Data is invading every nook and cranny of every team, department, and company in every industry, everywhere. Developing the talent needed to take full advantage must be a high priority. Indeed, everyone must be able to contribute to improving data quality, interpreting analyses, and conducting their own experiments. It will take decades for the public education systems to churn out enough people with the needed skills — far too long for companies to wait. Fortunately, managers, aided by a senior data scientist engaged for a few hours a week can introduce five powerful “tools” that will help their teams start to use analytics to solve important business problems.
Clinical and nonclinical staff at the Rotterdam Eye Hospital have improved patient care and raised staff morale at a very modest cost: 10 minutes a day and a special deck of cards. At the start of every shift, the team members get together for a brief “team-start.” Each team member rates his or her own mood as green (I’m good), orange (I’m okay but I have a few things I’m concerned about) or red (I’m under stress). The rest of the team doesn’t need to know that you’re under stress because you’re having a dispute with your landlord or you are worried about your ill toddler. How you feel, however, is important because it affects how you should be treated. Next, the team leader asks if there is anything in particular the team needs to know to work more effectively together that shift: For example, “Is there a delay in public transport so we can expect patients to be late for their appointments?,” or “Is there a patient with some kind of special need coming in?” Sharing the answers or results generated by the card questions and activities with the group ensures that the insights stick.
Learn more about the data analytics industry, dbt Cloud and dbt Core, as well as company news and updates.
Strategy and tactics are two terms that get thrown around a lot, often used interchangeably. But what exactly do they mean, what is the difference, and why is it important? In this article, we look at the contrast between strategy and tactics, and the most effective ways to use each, whether you're trying to win a war, start a business, or reach any other important objective.
How Eleven Madison Park survived the 2008 Global Recession ... and what this tells us about operating through the capital cycle.