4 ms·

No-bullshit tenets for faster decision-making

80 points by juanplusjuan 5y ago

shoto_io 5y ago
I have used tenets quite extensively in product development. They were introduced by a bunch of ex-Amazonians. At Amazon, tenets seem to be very popular, see [1]. The article is a good first introduction to the framework, although I have to admit that I found the tenets mentioned in the article not very convincing. Thinking about how you would finish the sentences "We would never do..." and "We would always do..." is a good way to start drafting tenets. A good quality check for a tenet is to ask if the tenet could be used for decision making, for example in a heated team discussion. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5raEKA57PMY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5raEKA57PMY
- xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
  The sort of tenets Amazon uses are generally vague enough to abused by management constantly. I wouldn't say they are "popular", rather forced down your throat. They're constantly mocked and poked fun at by ICs. A good tenet is unambiguous in application and interpretation. There's no way to misuse a good tenet. Some of Amazon's are incredibly easy to abuse: frugality, disagree and commit, be right a lot. Here are some strong ones that may or may not be useful to your company: If a decision is easy to reverse, don't spend to much time figuring out of it's the right decision. Prioritize paying for something over building something assuming the annualized cost of an engineer is ~$X (e.g. $1MM). Document and test internal systems as if you were selling them to a customer. Simple, repetitive and dumb over complex, convenient and smart. Plan to throw the first iteration away. Be honest, and be honest to customers. Always assume disaster can and will strike at the worst possible time. Better safe than sorry. Prioritize people over processes. This means don't follow some dumb process if it makes everyone upset. Change the process. Admit when you were wrong.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    My understanding is the latter list are closer to how tenets are used (per the article and from some arms-length experiences). The three “some of Amazon’s” that you object to are LPs and are indeed not framed as tenets. I’ve generally thought of tenets as smaller in scope; “on this team/project, our tenets are _____” They would keep overall company vision in mind, but would break it down more specifically to the local situation, helping to guide people to a common understanding of “we have a generally frugal culture/LP, but in this case, we will value speed over cost in this type of trade off”.
    - xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
      > The three “some of Amazon’s” that you object to are LPs and are indeed not framed as tenets. They are indeed LPs but they were effectively framed as tenets everywhere possible. I'd be wary of this sort of Amazon culture creeping into other orgs.
  - stadium 5y ago
    > A good tenet is unambiguous in application and interpretation Are tenet and non-functional requirement about the same thing?
    - psd1 5y ago
      Iiuc no, because a requirement is a characteristic of a piece of work. A tenet might guide you to stipulate a req.
  - recursive 5y ago
    > Admit when you were wrong. Not this one. This one has no plausible opposite. It's just going to lead to weasel-y debates. You can't remind someone else to admit that they're wrong, because they don't think they're wrong.
    - grayclhn 5y ago
      +1 — (to paraphrase parent’s point, which I think people are misunderstanding…) this is great advice for people to follow in general, but not something you can bring up in a contentious meeting to help get to an agreement.
  - charles_f 5y ago
    That's been my experience as well, but I think that's less due to management malice than it is a combination of a lack of understanding for what tenets are for (being useful decision facilitators rather than a blend proclamation of corporate mambo jumbo), and a lack of decisiveness. It's very amazonian to ask for both top quality, and shortest cost and delays at the same time. Since that is not physically achievable, resulting tenets are bland. Note that the leadership principles are also a form of tenets, with their own internal contradictions that is waved away by a usual "it's a constructive tension".
- jadeforrest 5y ago
  That was a helpful link. Could you give an example of a tenet you find more convincing?
- varelse 5y ago
  And if you like seeing a bunch of middle-aged mostly white dudes act like teenage mean girls over whether to add new tenets to their already too long list, after getting mildly intoxicated doing insipid team building exercises for low-end prizes, just attend one of their principal engineer summits and see just how full of you know what this rabbit hole really is. Oh wait I think they stopped doing that after they "lowered the bar" for being a principal engineer there so much that most of them can no longer code. And that's how there was a sudden explosion of senior principal engineers...
  - varelse 5y ago
    Oh a downvote how quaint. So let's double down and talk about how when I was part of senior leadership there all we did was talk about who we were going to fire instead of what we were going to build. They were called "unregretted attritions" because people couldn't be honest about just randomly firing people who easily got past our ridiculous coding interviews and standards and no tenet could ever fix that.
Y_Y 5y ago
"We value case-by-case reasoning over general principles."
- psd1 5y ago
  A curious game. The only winning move is not to play.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ggambetta 5y ago
...and whatever you do, please don't call them "tenants" in your design docs. And if I may add another request (not an "ask")... learn the difference between segue and Segway. Reading anything that plays that fast and loose with language makes me think that the author plays equally fast and loose with other aspects of their writing that I'm not qualified to judge (in a way similar to how we can spot errors in movies that depict hackers, but are more likely to "buy" whatever we see on a medical drama), so it makes me generally distrustful of the material. Am I being pedantic? I don't think I am. I think clear communication is super important. Edit: my comment is inspired by, but not directly related to, the article.
- jadeforrest 5y ago
  I don't understand your critique -- the words tenant and segue do not appear in this post. What are examples of playing fast and loose with language?
  - ggambetta 5y ago
    My comment is not a critique of the post at all; the post just made me think of this.
- politician 5y ago
  2nd’d. The “All Hands” presentation to communicate “Our Tenants” is a classic fail.
  - charles_f 5y ago
    That is, unless you want to present Bob and Rebecca, who decided to make the "Red Cedar" meeting room their home for a small monthly fee.
- kzrdude 5y ago
  Maybe I'm like many others, I heard of Segway long before I learned the word segue. I also don't mind adjusting spelling of words over time, so I don't mind if segue gains a new spelling namely segway.
Frost1x 5y ago
The only no-BS tenet for business decision making is: "will this make the business money or position the business to better make money." All the rest are n-th order effects in the decision making process. The quicker you come to grips with this, the better. Everything bends to that. It defines the rules and the exceptions to the rules for all other tenets you may derive. Having other principles is just PR to defer to so people forget what they're actually doing. "We make products to help people", "we value quality over speed", whatever. It's all a waste of time and those tenets will change depending on if it makes the business money or not. They can provide the framework for the model of how the business makes money, your 2nd order rules you develop really do this, but from my experience, all such policies are subject to change and on a frequent basis until you find a set for the underlying driver.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  There’s a point beyond which such reductions cease to be helpful. If I wrote a personal fitness book that simply said “be healthier” or a self-help psychology book that said “Be happier”, or a road atlas that said “don’t get lost”, that probably captures the essential goal of the task at hand, but people want/need to know the specific how that the method is prescribing. Someone who is training for collegiate sports needs different advice than a middle-age person who’s out of shape and 50# overweight. “Be healthier” isn’t enough. Someone who has just lost a child needs different content than someone who found out their spouse is cheating on them or considering a divorce. “Be happier” isn’t enough. Tenet statements do change from time to time as business pressures and realities change. That’s good.
black_13 5y ago
Move fast and break down people
varelse 5y ago
Just say no to these mental shortcuts and hire good people and trust them to do the right thing. If you need tenets just to stay engaged at your day job you are either incompetent or you're not at the right job. Or in the language of this silly article: "Hire good people and trust them."
- EdwardDiego 5y ago
  Maybe not tenets, but statements of certain things we hold to be true then - a simple one in one of the best teams I was a member of was - "we fix the yellow" (warnings).
  - varelse 5y ago
    Slogans are weak. Good people are strong. Great people even stronger. But again I don't get why we keep trying to find shortcuts around hiring people we can trust.
    - lovemenot 5y ago
      For every organisation with one 10x person there's another 9 with mediocrity. No matter how much we may strive to hire better, overall there's a need to not only rely on having the best people.
      - varelse 5y ago
        This assumes you have no control over who you allow on to your team and that is an erroneous assumption. If you are in such a situation it is time for you to find a new team. Time is a luxury none of us have.
        lovemenot 5y ago
        You seem to have missed my point. I was talking about all organisations, not necessarily the one that I am in and can control. Even if there's little need for such tenets in my excellent organisation, that doesn't preclude their utility in less-than-excellent organisations, which are certainly more numerous.
jadeforrest 5y ago
A fun exercise would be to make up tenets for existing companies. Let me start: Tesla * We value aspirational storytelling over the "truth". [We might make it true later!] Apple * We think different, except when it comes to creating a non-toxic environment. Facebook * We value making money and engagement over democracy, people's lives, or their mental health. Google * We value starting things over making them successful. [We will definitely kill it in a few years, but don't worry, we'll try again later.] * Don't be evil, unless you're an executive or it will make the company a lot of money.
brokebroadbeat 5y ago
That link to coordination models is good. Wish I had that when writing https://visitmy.website/2020/11/06/users-trust-delivery/ https://visitmy.website/2020/11/06/users-trust-delivery/

80 points by juanplusjuan 5y ago

I have used tenets quite extensively in product development. They were introduced by a bunch of ex-Amazonians. At Amazon, tenets seem to be very popular, see [1]. The article is a good first introduction to the framework, although I have to admit that I found the tenets mentioned in the article not very convincing. Thinking about how you would finish the sentences "We would never do..." and "We would always do..." is a good way to start drafting tenets. A good quality check for a tenet is to ask if the tenet could be used for decision making, for example in a heated team discussion. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5raEKA57PMY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5raEKA57PMY

xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
The sort of tenets Amazon uses are generally vague enough to abused by management constantly. I wouldn't say they are "popular", rather forced down your throat. They're constantly mocked and poked fun at by ICs. A good tenet is unambiguous in application and interpretation. There's no way to misuse a good tenet. Some of Amazon's are incredibly easy to abuse: frugality, disagree and commit, be right a lot. Here are some strong ones that may or may not be useful to your company: If a decision is easy to reverse, don't spend to much time figuring out of it's the right decision. Prioritize paying for something over building something assuming the annualized cost of an engineer is ~$X (e.g. $1MM). Document and test internal systems as if you were selling them to a customer. Simple, repetitive and dumb over complex, convenient and smart. Plan to throw the first iteration away. Be honest, and be honest to customers. Always assume disaster can and will strike at the worst possible time. Better safe than sorry. Prioritize people over processes. This means don't follow some dumb process if it makes everyone upset. Change the process. Admit when you were wrong.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  My understanding is the latter list are closer to how tenets are used (per the article and from some arms-length experiences). The three “some of Amazon’s” that you object to are LPs and are indeed not framed as tenets. I’ve generally thought of tenets as smaller in scope; “on this team/project, our tenets are _____” They would keep overall company vision in mind, but would break it down more specifically to the local situation, helping to guide people to a common understanding of “we have a generally frugal culture/LP, but in this case, we will value speed over cost in this type of trade off”.
  - xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
    > The three “some of Amazon’s” that you object to are LPs and are indeed not framed as tenets. They are indeed LPs but they were effectively framed as tenets everywhere possible. I'd be wary of this sort of Amazon culture creeping into other orgs.
- stadium 5y ago
  > A good tenet is unambiguous in application and interpretation Are tenet and non-functional requirement about the same thing?
  - psd1 5y ago
    Iiuc no, because a requirement is a characteristic of a piece of work. A tenet might guide you to stipulate a req.
- recursive 5y ago
  > Admit when you were wrong. Not this one. This one has no plausible opposite. It's just going to lead to weasel-y debates. You can't remind someone else to admit that they're wrong, because they don't think they're wrong.
  - grayclhn 5y ago
    +1 — (to paraphrase parent’s point, which I think people are misunderstanding…) this is great advice for people to follow in general, but not something you can bring up in a contentious meeting to help get to an agreement.
- charles_f 5y ago
  That's been my experience as well, but I think that's less due to management malice than it is a combination of a lack of understanding for what tenets are for (being useful decision facilitators rather than a blend proclamation of corporate mambo jumbo), and a lack of decisiveness. It's very amazonian to ask for both top quality, and shortest cost and delays at the same time. Since that is not physically achievable, resulting tenets are bland. Note that the leadership principles are also a form of tenets, with their own internal contradictions that is waved away by a usual "it's a constructive tension".
jadeforrest 5y ago
That was a helpful link. Could you give an example of a tenet you find more convincing?
varelse 5y ago
And if you like seeing a bunch of middle-aged mostly white dudes act like teenage mean girls over whether to add new tenets to their already too long list, after getting mildly intoxicated doing insipid team building exercises for low-end prizes, just attend one of their principal engineer summits and see just how full of you know what this rabbit hole really is. Oh wait I think they stopped doing that after they "lowered the bar" for being a principal engineer there so much that most of them can no longer code. And that's how there was a sudden explosion of senior principal engineers...
- varelse 5y ago
  Oh a downvote how quaint. So let's double down and talk about how when I was part of senior leadership there all we did was talk about who we were going to fire instead of what we were going to build. They were called "unregretted attritions" because people couldn't be honest about just randomly firing people who easily got past our ridiculous coding interviews and standards and no tenet could ever fix that.

Y_Y 5y ago

"We value case-by-case reasoning over general principles."

psd1 5y ago
A curious game. The only winning move is not to play.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ggambetta 5y ago

...and whatever you do, please don't call them "tenants" in your design docs. And if I may add another request (not an "ask")... learn the difference between segue and Segway. Reading anything that plays that fast and loose with language makes me think that the author plays equally fast and loose with other aspects of their writing that I'm not qualified to judge (in a way similar to how we can spot errors in movies that depict hackers, but are more likely to "buy" whatever we see on a medical drama), so it makes me generally distrustful of the material. Am I being pedantic? I don't think I am. I think clear communication is super important. Edit: my comment is inspired by, but not directly related to, the article.

jadeforrest 5y ago
I don't understand your critique -- the words tenant and segue do not appear in this post. What are examples of playing fast and loose with language?
- ggambetta 5y ago
  My comment is not a critique of the post at all; the post just made me think of this.
politician 5y ago
2nd’d. The “All Hands” presentation to communicate “Our Tenants” is a classic fail.
- charles_f 5y ago
  That is, unless you want to present Bob and Rebecca, who decided to make the "Red Cedar" meeting room their home for a small monthly fee.
kzrdude 5y ago
Maybe I'm like many others, I heard of Segway long before I learned the word segue. I also don't mind adjusting spelling of words over time, so I don't mind if segue gains a new spelling namely segway.

Frost1x 5y ago

The only no-BS tenet for business decision making is: "will this make the business money or position the business to better make money." All the rest are n-th order effects in the decision making process. The quicker you come to grips with this, the better. Everything bends to that. It defines the rules and the exceptions to the rules for all other tenets you may derive. Having other principles is just PR to defer to so people forget what they're actually doing. "We make products to help people", "we value quality over speed", whatever. It's all a waste of time and those tenets will change depending on if it makes the business money or not. They can provide the framework for the model of how the business makes money, your 2nd order rules you develop really do this, but from my experience, all such policies are subject to change and on a frequent basis until you find a set for the underlying driver.

sokoloff 5y ago
There’s a point beyond which such reductions cease to be helpful. If I wrote a personal fitness book that simply said “be healthier” or a self-help psychology book that said “Be happier”, or a road atlas that said “don’t get lost”, that probably captures the essential goal of the task at hand, but people want/need to know the specific how that the method is prescribing. Someone who is training for collegiate sports needs different advice than a middle-age person who’s out of shape and 50# overweight. “Be healthier” isn’t enough. Someone who has just lost a child needs different content than someone who found out their spouse is cheating on them or considering a divorce. “Be happier” isn’t enough. Tenet statements do change from time to time as business pressures and realities change. That’s good.

black_13 5y ago

Move fast and break down people

varelse 5y ago

Just say no to these mental shortcuts and hire good people and trust them to do the right thing. If you need tenets just to stay engaged at your day job you are either incompetent or you're not at the right job. Or in the language of this silly article: "Hire good people and trust them."

EdwardDiego 5y ago
Maybe not tenets, but statements of certain things we hold to be true then - a simple one in one of the best teams I was a member of was - "we fix the yellow" (warnings).
- varelse 5y ago
  Slogans are weak. Good people are strong. Great people even stronger. But again I don't get why we keep trying to find shortcuts around hiring people we can trust.
  - lovemenot 5y ago
    For every organisation with one 10x person there's another 9 with mediocrity. No matter how much we may strive to hire better, overall there's a need to not only rely on having the best people.
    - varelse 5y ago
      This assumes you have no control over who you allow on to your team and that is an erroneous assumption. If you are in such a situation it is time for you to find a new team. Time is a luxury none of us have.
      - lovemenot 5y ago
        You seem to have missed my point. I was talking about all organisations, not necessarily the one that I am in and can control. Even if there's little need for such tenets in my excellent organisation, that doesn't preclude their utility in less-than-excellent organisations, which are certainly more numerous.

jadeforrest 5y ago

A fun exercise would be to make up tenets for existing companies. Let me start: Tesla * We value aspirational storytelling over the "truth". [We might make it true later!] Apple * We think different, except when it comes to creating a non-toxic environment. Facebook * We value making money and engagement over democracy, people's lives, or their mental health. Google * We value starting things over making them successful. [We will definitely kill it in a few years, but don't worry, we'll try again later.] * Don't be evil, unless you're an executive or it will make the company a lot of money.

brokebroadbeat 5y ago

That link to coordination models is good. Wish I had that when writing https://visitmy.website/2020/11/06/users-trust-delivery/ https://visitmy.website/2020/11/06/users-trust-delivery/