This is missing one of my biggest tools: establishing the right feedback loops. For example, there was a novel situation where we thought we might be able to d

This is missing one of my biggest tools: establishing the right feedback loops. For example, there was a novel situation where we thought we might be able to do something for the internal team of experts that was handling it. So we paired one of their people up with one of the developers and said, "Take a few weeks and try out things that might help." That short feedback loop between need and solutions let them iterate through a variety of things to see what had the highest ROI. Or at the last company I co-founded, we started out by doing user-testing every Tuesday afternoon. My co-founder and I would try things and see how they worked on real users, iterating from there. Later, as we got more developers and enough users, we gradually built up a sophisticated set of tools for conducting experiments. Developers were closely involved in that work and we had a ship-early, ship-often approach that let people release something, see how it was working, and then adjust. I think of it sort of like game design. If you can structure things so that teams can develop a rewarding emotional connection via an overall purpose and frequent feedback, they'll just do the right thing naturally. Through that lens, the need for a lot of active bossing people around can sometimes be seen as a sign of bad management.