7 ms·

Action Plan for a New CTO

303 points by sblank 4y ago

humantorso 4y ago
Good read. As someone part of a large of org, some these are spot on.
wyager 4y ago
When reading articles like these, I can't tell if they are very low semantic density, or if they are using terms of art that sound like noise but are actually communicating valuable information. "accelerating mission/delivering innovative products/services at high speed" - what does this actually mean? This sounds like a jumble of positively-connoted words that I would throw together if I was trying to fill space in a powerpoint. "The CTO’s job is to: create a common process, language and tools for innovation [and] make them permanent with a written innovation doctrine and policy". Is this not just "Draw the rest of the owl"? "The CEO's job is to: make the company make lots of money."
- eatonphil 4y ago
  Yes I agree. While it was an interesting story, I could not find a useful takeaway.
- n42 4y ago
  I have found that higher level management works in sort of.. higher order derivatives of process. they end up having to use bullshit sounding terms like this as a result. the more you get into management, the more meaningful those sentences become, but I totally understand it absolutely sounds like bullshit. it also definitely becomes a coping mechanism to management-fuck your sentences in order to counteract your crippling imposter syndrome as you ascend
  - someguydave 4y ago
    Why isn’t the more common solution to senior management imposter syndrome to capitulate to your ignorance and humbly speak with those at the lower rungs?
- majormajor 4y ago
  One rough translation for the first two lines there would be: Look for the orgs that are "getting shit done" and then "figure out how to unblock the people who want to get shit done in the other orgs based on how the currently-productive ones do things, and make that a company-wide policy." In any large company things will have changed since the org was founded, so some of what used to work won't be efficient any more. So you both have to spot what's working now vs what used to work, and also figure out how to get a sufficient group of "doers" (vs just middle management) that they should buy in even though a lot of people won't be super motivated for the classic Office Space reason: "Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime; so where's the motivation?" - and you often are going to have to do it without that motivation being just financial.
  - wyager 4y ago
    Thanks, that is all very coherent. I would like to read your version of the article :)
- jagtesh 4y ago
  Extending programming patterns to how executive management operates: they need a very high level language with support for generics and abstractions to communicate efficiently without getting caught in the details. That is the job of lower level management. Terms like “innovation” are a placeholder for something that will vary greatly depending on the instance.
- someguydave 4y ago
  My objection to the article is that it is simply two guys bullshitting about what might be the case instead of a story of trials and results.
lifeisstillgood 4y ago
I try and look at companies today as beasts trapped in the middle ages, trying to break free. I think that software literacy is a great lens to view the changes coming, but as well as that I think plain old democracy is a great way to view these things. A company with 30,000 people may as well be seen as a (very small) country - and it may well benefit us from trying to run it in the same democratic manner. A top down hierarchy is how most companies are run and most especially rewarded. The CTO is set up here to basically tell people how it is going to be and what to do. he can't - so try democracy:-) Edit: I think the democracy argument matters because of the inherent near-socialopathic approach inherent in the CTOs position - "I as a C-level exec want to find people in the organisation who will work hard to transform it, but will not receive anything like the inherent rewards (I will), but without whom ..." The solution to Kings and Tyranny is not highly trained Kings with great people skills.
- eloff 4y ago
  It's interesting that companies are these little island command economies inside the market economy. Is there a better way to organize them? Would democracy really work? In countries, many consider democracy to be actually worse than an excellent dictatorship/monarchy. But it's a hell of a lot better than the bad ones. And there's no way to prevent a good dictatorship from going bad. Just because the king did a good job, doesn't mean his son will. Democracy only works as well as the voters are educated and participate. Companies would seem as vulnerable to that as countries are.
  - dvtrn 4y ago
    Is there a better way to organize them Commonly known as a (Tech) union?
    - blep_ 4y ago
      Unions are adversarial organizations designed to balance an existing structure that can't be easily removed, but this is about "if you were inventing a new kind of organization that didn't need an adversarial structure, what's the best way to do so?" and you can do much better than management-vs-union there.
eatonphil 4y ago
While this is an interesting piece overall, based on the title I'm struggling to find the "action plan" part. The "lesson's learned" section is just statements, not even suggestions. * Large companies often have divisions and functions with innovation, incubation and technology scouting all operating independently with no common language or tools * Innovation heroics as the sole source of deployment of new capabilities are a sign of a dysfunctional organization * Innovation isn’t a single activity (incubators, accelerators, hackathons); it is a strategically organized end-to-end process from idea to deployment * Somewhere three, four or five levels down the organization are the real centers of innovation – accelerating mission/delivering innovative products/services at high speed * The CTO’s job is to: * create a common process, language and tools for innovation make them permanent with a written innovation doctrine and policy * And don’t ever tell anyone you’re a “short timer” The only actual suggestion in there is "create a common process, language and tools for innovation make them permanent with a written innovation doctrine and policy" but it doesn't really say how to do this or go into detail about what this might look like.
- cogman10 4y ago
  > but it doesn't really say how to do this or go into detail about what this might look like. I think that's because for each organization that is likely going to be different. It may be enough to simply push to product that "Hey, we need to also spend time on new innovations, not just day to day feature grinds" and lay out plans to get those greenfield innovations prioritized and deployed. It may be the case that the innovation is around infrastructure "Hey, we are deploying to Ubuntu 14.04 VMs with an inflexable infrastructure. Perhaps we need to start working towards something more modern and flexable?" That will look very different from just giving PM time for innovation and may stop development from making meaningful innovations. The point of the article, I think, is to provide a path and light on innovation and not leave it to some dark development corners where innovation is a "don't ask don't tell" sort of scenario.
mandeepj 4y ago
> “I’m going to let a few of the execs know I’m not out for turf because I only intend to be here for a few years.” Not sure if he had said that during his interview and still got hired. This is borderline common-sense to not put yourself as a short-timer. If that's the bar of the CTO at certain places, then I'd do amazingly well.
sgt101 4y ago
Deliver at speed, deliver at speed, deliver at speed. My experience of the products: good, shit, shit, shit, shit, good, shit, shit... Because there is no thought! There is no reflection or design or quality or depth. Deliver at the pace that's right.
thinkingkong 4y ago
In a broader sense you can't really take this advice and roll into a CTO role and repeat it. The problems are going to be different everywhere, even though the result might feel the same: Some 'slowness' at these congealed organizations where things aren't moving to the naked eye. That's where the similarities usually stop. You have to talk to the executives to figure out what the perceived issues are, and then talk to your staff (and skip all the way to the implementers) to figure out what their issues are too. Only with a full picture can you figure out what the problems are, and what some potential solutions might be. * You cannot rely on people to provide face value suggestions or problems because politics is actually a thing. * You cannot rely on people to provide meaningful action items because incentives are usually misaligned. * The whole team will probably know about a division or group that needs to be fired and nobody will do it; if you don't then you immediately lose face. * Companies at this scale usually value predictability over speed. So building reporting structures that values said predictability works wonders.
- mathattack 4y ago
  “Happy families are all the same, unhappy families are each disfunctional in their own way” or something like that by Dostoevsky.
  - Witoso 4y ago
    „Anna Karenina” - Leo Tolstoy
  - kweinber 4y ago
    This comes up every few years and it is important to note that the opposite is true. Most unhappy families have drug abuse or interpersonal abuse at play. Most happy families are happy and fulfilled for a variety of interesting reasons.
    - random314 4y ago
      Or health issues, or unemployment or death in the family or divorce. You didn't give examples of variety of interesting reasons.
motbus3 4y ago
a CTO should be a normal role without bonuses. or at least only attached to the time the person has been in that position. ctos come, fuck the company forever to get a first good year or two then leave everything behind. ctos, ceos, cfos, just bs ppl
- dexterdog 4y ago
  The problem is that most CTOs are just trying to move up to CEO so they have to play the game which is shaping the eng and prod orgs to make it looks like he runs a tight ship and speaking the language. Then he just has to wait for the CEO to falter or move on. I have a new CTO right now and it's too early to tell if he is one of those many or if he really wants to build a good engineering org.
pavlov 4y ago
On this topic I’m finding Steve Sinofsky’s “Hardcore Software” blog/newsletter very interesting lately: https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/ https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/ He’s a Microsoft careerist engineer who rose through the ranks to be in charge of Office through the ambitious “Ribbon UI” redesign, then was appointed to salvage the Windows and Services segment as the Longhorn/Vista debacle was close to shipping. His latest entries describe the sorry state of the Windows org as he came in, and the initial actions and goals he set to rectify the ship. In hindsight we know that Windows 7 was a success under his leadership and 8 wasn’t, so even though his style is a bit rambling, it makes for good reading to try to understand the decisions that put Windows on its course.
ignoramous 4y ago
> Anthony had long come to the same conclusion I had, that highly visible corporate incubators do a good job of shaping culture and getting great press, but most often their biggest products were demos that never get deployed to the field. Cisco is pretty good at this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8348900 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8348900 (2014) > As we were finishing my coffee Anthony said, "I'm going to let a few of the execs know I'm not out for turf because I only intend to be here for a few years." One ought to know, 'tis but a game of poker, mister. More on the role of a CTO: https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2007/07/the_different_cto_roles.html https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2007/07/the_different_c... (2007) and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20642423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20642423 (2019)
- drc500free 4y ago
  Thank you for the further reading.
hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
A very good lesson I learned from a previous company (medium size, 1-2K employees) where a C-Level exec was hired in and needed to make some large scale changes in the company with speed: 1. You can't "fake it" at this level. One of the most impressive things IMO about this exec was his ability to know, at a fairly low level, what every department and org in the company was doing, and to diagnose their strengths and weaknesses very quickly. We'd have quarterly day-long meetings where every department would present, and his ability to quickly hone in on critical low-level details was extremely impressive. I think he would have failed if he had just thought that his job was to "brush with broad strokes". (Aside, this did NOT mean he was a micromanager, it just meant that he had a very good understanding of the details across many departments). 2. It's important to put some structures in place where departments are forced to show some accountability for speed. For example, one metric that I actually hated at the time, but later learned to appreciate the purpose, was that individual departments were judged on the number of A/B tests they ran per month. I hated this metric at the time because I felt it was easily "gamed" - departments would run small little A/B tests like button color changes. However, after a while there were a couple of big cultural changes that had taken place: (1) the company built tools and processes that made it easier to deploy and run tests in the first place (better CI/CD pipelines, better analysis tools, etc.) which had the overall effect of letting us ship faster with higher quality, (2) while yes, there was a lot of "gaming" of count of A/B tests run in the beginning, it didn't take that long for teams to actually run out of tests to game, and people actually put in the hard work of thinking about better tests to run, and (3) it changed our culture to become much more data-driven - it wasn't perfect, and "data driven" can be a double-edged sword, but it was an improvement.
- the_watcher 4y ago
  Thanks for sharing the second part! I’ve worked places as a DS where we were ramping up A/B tests, and it’s honestly one of the worst experiences a DS can have - everybody is asking why you need such large samples, then when you get null results, everyone wants an explanation for why (“this idea didn’t do what you wanted it to” isn’t an acceptable answer), etc. You’re entirely right that running a bunch of tests is a really effective way to advocate for better resources to run the tests. While I’ve never worked anywhere that ran out of ideas to game the testing incentives, it’s definitely true that people who initially fall into the trap of gaming the tests come around with some experience and in general the org builds better intuitions and culture around how to use tests. It may be that an org that _has_ a culture of testing just has them constantly running in the background but they’re minor in terms of time spent running them, but that building a culture of testing initially involves the whole org focusing on it to a seemingly ridiculous extent, as it’s the only way to generate enough momentum to get the infrastructure and institutional knowledge right.
boulos 4y ago
Huh, TIL that Steve posts these here himself :). As feedback, I find that new executives, even with external credibility won't be able to get the "innovation heroes" to talk to them at first. You have to make time, make space, and follow through. Don't just have a single all-hands meeting to say "Come to me with your stories of friction", but continually do "skip level meetings" and "meet the team 'lunches'". And then boost that signal personally. If you want an organization to value the removal of friction and apathy, it requires the most senior executives to actually celebrate the groups that were fighting that fight. Otherwise, these folks would rather remain nameless and wait for this new executive to go away like all the rest have. They're already doing their job, and it's too emotionally taxing to believe that this new executive means what they said.
throwaway6201 4y ago
I previously worked at a large enterprise software company. The CTO is smart, but talks expletives all the times and is not approachable beyond their inner circle. The people around the CTO effectively control the access and because of their attitude no one dares to challenge or propose anything newer than whatever exists. Everyone used to hate the work in private conversations. But the CTO effective chose to stay on their own island, only communicate with people around them. There was never a two-way conversation from real engineers to the CTO. And ya, hackathons used to happen all the time with a lot of "assertion" about innovation, but nothing ever gets shipped from the hacks. It's just to satisfy the engineers so they feel excited about working on something new and receive a token gift card.
rahimiali 4y ago
I’m not getting the problem Anthony is trying to solve. I get that people are trying to keep him at bay, but what is he trying to do that they don’t want him to do? I get that he’s trying to identify pockets of innovation, but what will he do with those pockets? It sounds like his game plan is to do “cto stuff”. But shouldn’t there be a more precise goal? Like picking some business metric and cause it to move in the right direction? Or define a new metric? Or introduce a fundamental new way for the company to do business? Once you know the specific problem you want to solve in the company, it becomes a lot easier to pick a strategy. But maybe I’m just misunderstanding what the cto of a 30k person company does.
rubin55 4y ago
Ha what a cool article. This reminded me so much of Hewlett and Packard's management style. I think they called it "Management by Walking Around".
maerF0x0 4y ago
> the individuals others in the company point to who single-handedly fought the system and got a new product, project or service delivered There is a toxicity lurking here. We should also be looking for the individuals who brought positive innovations, fought the system, and failed to overcome it. Why failed? Because it's not their fault that the system is broken, we cannot burden innovators with both the fixing of the environment, plus innovation. Else their only innovation may be how to cope with an increasingly terrible organization, and if that org wants survive or evolve it needs the innovators to stay.

303 points by sblank 4y ago

Good read. As someone part of a large of org, some these are spot on.

When reading articles like these, I can't tell if they are very low semantic density, or if they are using terms of art that sound like noise but are actually communicating valuable information. "accelerating mission/delivering innovative products/services at high speed" - what does this actually mean? This sounds like a jumble of positively-connoted words that I would throw together if I was trying to fill space in a powerpoint. "The CTO’s job is to: create a common process, language and tools for innovation [and] make them permanent with a written innovation doctrine and policy". Is this not just "Draw the rest of the owl"? "The CEO's job is to: make the company make lots of money."

eatonphil 4y ago
Yes I agree. While it was an interesting story, I could not find a useful takeaway.
n42 4y ago
I have found that higher level management works in sort of.. higher order derivatives of process. they end up having to use bullshit sounding terms like this as a result. the more you get into management, the more meaningful those sentences become, but I totally understand it absolutely sounds like bullshit. it also definitely becomes a coping mechanism to management-fuck your sentences in order to counteract your crippling imposter syndrome as you ascend
- someguydave 4y ago
  Why isn’t the more common solution to senior management imposter syndrome to capitulate to your ignorance and humbly speak with those at the lower rungs?
majormajor 4y ago
One rough translation for the first two lines there would be: Look for the orgs that are "getting shit done" and then "figure out how to unblock the people who want to get shit done in the other orgs based on how the currently-productive ones do things, and make that a company-wide policy." In any large company things will have changed since the org was founded, so some of what used to work won't be efficient any more. So you both have to spot what's working now vs what used to work, and also figure out how to get a sufficient group of "doers" (vs just middle management) that they should buy in even though a lot of people won't be super motivated for the classic Office Space reason: "Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime; so where's the motivation?" - and you often are going to have to do it without that motivation being just financial.
- wyager 4y ago
  Thanks, that is all very coherent. I would like to read your version of the article :)
jagtesh 4y ago
Extending programming patterns to how executive management operates: they need a very high level language with support for generics and abstractions to communicate efficiently without getting caught in the details. That is the job of lower level management. Terms like “innovation” are a placeholder for something that will vary greatly depending on the instance.
someguydave 4y ago
My objection to the article is that it is simply two guys bullshitting about what might be the case instead of a story of trials and results.

lifeisstillgood 4y ago

I try and look at companies today as beasts trapped in the middle ages, trying to break free. I think that software literacy is a great lens to view the changes coming, but as well as that I think plain old democracy is a great way to view these things. A company with 30,000 people may as well be seen as a (very small) country - and it may well benefit us from trying to run it in the same democratic manner. A top down hierarchy is how most companies are run and most especially rewarded. The CTO is set up here to basically tell people how it is going to be and what to do. he can't - so try democracy:-) Edit: I think the democracy argument matters because of the inherent near-socialopathic approach inherent in the CTOs position - "I as a C-level exec want to find people in the organisation who will work hard to transform it, but will not receive anything like the inherent rewards (I will), but without whom ..." The solution to Kings and Tyranny is not highly trained Kings with great people skills.

eloff 4y ago
It's interesting that companies are these little island command economies inside the market economy. Is there a better way to organize them? Would democracy really work? In countries, many consider democracy to be actually worse than an excellent dictatorship/monarchy. But it's a hell of a lot better than the bad ones. And there's no way to prevent a good dictatorship from going bad. Just because the king did a good job, doesn't mean his son will. Democracy only works as well as the voters are educated and participate. Companies would seem as vulnerable to that as countries are.
- dvtrn 4y ago
  Is there a better way to organize them Commonly known as a (Tech) union?
  - blep_ 4y ago
    Unions are adversarial organizations designed to balance an existing structure that can't be easily removed, but this is about "if you were inventing a new kind of organization that didn't need an adversarial structure, what's the best way to do so?" and you can do much better than management-vs-union there.

eatonphil 4y ago

While this is an interesting piece overall, based on the title I'm struggling to find the "action plan" part. The "lesson's learned" section is just statements, not even suggestions. * Large companies often have divisions and functions with innovation, incubation and technology scouting all operating independently with no common language or tools * Innovation heroics as the sole source of deployment of new capabilities are a sign of a dysfunctional organization * Innovation isn’t a single activity (incubators, accelerators, hackathons); it is a strategically organized end-to-end process from idea to deployment * Somewhere three, four or five levels down the organization are the real centers of innovation – accelerating mission/delivering innovative products/services at high speed * The CTO’s job is to: * create a common process, language and tools for innovation make them permanent with a written innovation doctrine and policy * And don’t ever tell anyone you’re a “short timer” The only actual suggestion in there is "create a common process, language and tools for innovation make them permanent with a written innovation doctrine and policy" but it doesn't really say how to do this or go into detail about what this might look like.

cogman10 4y ago
> but it doesn't really say how to do this or go into detail about what this might look like. I think that's because for each organization that is likely going to be different. It may be enough to simply push to product that "Hey, we need to also spend time on new innovations, not just day to day feature grinds" and lay out plans to get those greenfield innovations prioritized and deployed. It may be the case that the innovation is around infrastructure "Hey, we are deploying to Ubuntu 14.04 VMs with an inflexable infrastructure. Perhaps we need to start working towards something more modern and flexable?" That will look very different from just giving PM time for innovation and may stop development from making meaningful innovations. The point of the article, I think, is to provide a path and light on innovation and not leave it to some dark development corners where innovation is a "don't ask don't tell" sort of scenario.

mandeepj 4y ago

> “I’m going to let a few of the execs know I’m not out for turf because I only intend to be here for a few years.” Not sure if he had said that during his interview and still got hired. This is borderline common-sense to not put yourself as a short-timer. If that's the bar of the CTO at certain places, then I'd do amazingly well.

sgt101 4y ago

Deliver at speed, deliver at speed, deliver at speed. My experience of the products: good, shit, shit, shit, shit, good, shit, shit... Because there is no thought! There is no reflection or design or quality or depth. Deliver at the pace that's right.

thinkingkong 4y ago

In a broader sense you can't really take this advice and roll into a CTO role and repeat it. The problems are going to be different everywhere, even though the result might feel the same: Some 'slowness' at these congealed organizations where things aren't moving to the naked eye. That's where the similarities usually stop. You have to talk to the executives to figure out what the perceived issues are, and then talk to your staff (and skip all the way to the implementers) to figure out what their issues are too. Only with a full picture can you figure out what the problems are, and what some potential solutions might be. * You cannot rely on people to provide face value suggestions or problems because politics is actually a thing. * You cannot rely on people to provide meaningful action items because incentives are usually misaligned. * The whole team will probably know about a division or group that needs to be fired and nobody will do it; if you don't then you immediately lose face. * Companies at this scale usually value predictability over speed. So building reporting structures that values said predictability works wonders.

mathattack 4y ago
“Happy families are all the same, unhappy families are each disfunctional in their own way” or something like that by Dostoevsky.
- Witoso 4y ago
  „Anna Karenina” - Leo Tolstoy
- kweinber 4y ago
  This comes up every few years and it is important to note that the opposite is true. Most unhappy families have drug abuse or interpersonal abuse at play. Most happy families are happy and fulfilled for a variety of interesting reasons.
  - random314 4y ago
    Or health issues, or unemployment or death in the family or divorce. You didn't give examples of variety of interesting reasons.

motbus3 4y ago

a CTO should be a normal role without bonuses. or at least only attached to the time the person has been in that position. ctos come, fuck the company forever to get a first good year or two then leave everything behind. ctos, ceos, cfos, just bs ppl

dexterdog 4y ago
The problem is that most CTOs are just trying to move up to CEO so they have to play the game which is shaping the eng and prod orgs to make it looks like he runs a tight ship and speaking the language. Then he just has to wait for the CEO to falter or move on. I have a new CTO right now and it's too early to tell if he is one of those many or if he really wants to build a good engineering org.

pavlov 4y ago

On this topic I’m finding Steve Sinofsky’s “Hardcore Software” blog/newsletter very interesting lately: https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/ https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/ He’s a Microsoft careerist engineer who rose through the ranks to be in charge of Office through the ambitious “Ribbon UI” redesign, then was appointed to salvage the Windows and Services segment as the Longhorn/Vista debacle was close to shipping. His latest entries describe the sorry state of the Windows org as he came in, and the initial actions and goals he set to rectify the ship. In hindsight we know that Windows 7 was a success under his leadership and 8 wasn’t, so even though his style is a bit rambling, it makes for good reading to try to understand the decisions that put Windows on its course.

ignoramous 4y ago

> Anthony had long come to the same conclusion I had, that highly visible corporate incubators do a good job of shaping culture and getting great press, but most often their biggest products were demos that never get deployed to the field. Cisco is pretty good at this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8348900 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8348900 (2014) > As we were finishing my coffee Anthony said, "I'm going to let a few of the execs know I'm not out for turf because I only intend to be here for a few years." One ought to know, 'tis but a game of poker, mister. More on the role of a CTO: https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2007/07/the_different_cto_roles.html https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2007/07/the_different_c... (2007) and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20642423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20642423 (2019)

drc500free 4y ago
Thank you for the further reading.

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago

A very good lesson I learned from a previous company (medium size, 1-2K employees) where a C-Level exec was hired in and needed to make some large scale changes in the company with speed: 1. You can't "fake it" at this level. One of the most impressive things IMO about this exec was his ability to know, at a fairly low level, what every department and org in the company was doing, and to diagnose their strengths and weaknesses very quickly. We'd have quarterly day-long meetings where every department would present, and his ability to quickly hone in on critical low-level details was extremely impressive. I think he would have failed if he had just thought that his job was to "brush with broad strokes". (Aside, this did NOT mean he was a micromanager, it just meant that he had a very good understanding of the details across many departments). 2. It's important to put some structures in place where departments are forced to show some accountability for speed. For example, one metric that I actually hated at the time, but later learned to appreciate the purpose, was that individual departments were judged on the number of A/B tests they ran per month. I hated this metric at the time because I felt it was easily "gamed" - departments would run small little A/B tests like button color changes. However, after a while there were a couple of big cultural changes that had taken place: (1) the company built tools and processes that made it easier to deploy and run tests in the first place (better CI/CD pipelines, better analysis tools, etc.) which had the overall effect of letting us ship faster with higher quality, (2) while yes, there was a lot of "gaming" of count of A/B tests run in the beginning, it didn't take that long for teams to actually run out of tests to game, and people actually put in the hard work of thinking about better tests to run, and (3) it changed our culture to become much more data-driven - it wasn't perfect, and "data driven" can be a double-edged sword, but it was an improvement.

the_watcher 4y ago
Thanks for sharing the second part! I’ve worked places as a DS where we were ramping up A/B tests, and it’s honestly one of the worst experiences a DS can have - everybody is asking why you need such large samples, then when you get null results, everyone wants an explanation for why (“this idea didn’t do what you wanted it to” isn’t an acceptable answer), etc. You’re entirely right that running a bunch of tests is a really effective way to advocate for better resources to run the tests. While I’ve never worked anywhere that ran out of ideas to game the testing incentives, it’s definitely true that people who initially fall into the trap of gaming the tests come around with some experience and in general the org builds better intuitions and culture around how to use tests. It may be that an org that _has_ a culture of testing just has them constantly running in the background but they’re minor in terms of time spent running them, but that building a culture of testing initially involves the whole org focusing on it to a seemingly ridiculous extent, as it’s the only way to generate enough momentum to get the infrastructure and institutional knowledge right.

boulos 4y ago

Huh, TIL that Steve posts these here himself :). As feedback, I find that new executives, even with external credibility won't be able to get the "innovation heroes" to talk to them at first. You have to make time, make space, and follow through. Don't just have a single all-hands meeting to say "Come to me with your stories of friction", but continually do "skip level meetings" and "meet the team 'lunches'". And then boost that signal personally. If you want an organization to value the removal of friction and apathy, it requires the most senior executives to actually celebrate the groups that were fighting that fight. Otherwise, these folks would rather remain nameless and wait for this new executive to go away like all the rest have. They're already doing their job, and it's too emotionally taxing to believe that this new executive means what they said.

throwaway6201 4y ago

I previously worked at a large enterprise software company. The CTO is smart, but talks expletives all the times and is not approachable beyond their inner circle. The people around the CTO effectively control the access and because of their attitude no one dares to challenge or propose anything newer than whatever exists. Everyone used to hate the work in private conversations. But the CTO effective chose to stay on their own island, only communicate with people around them. There was never a two-way conversation from real engineers to the CTO. And ya, hackathons used to happen all the time with a lot of "assertion" about innovation, but nothing ever gets shipped from the hacks. It's just to satisfy the engineers so they feel excited about working on something new and receive a token gift card.

rahimiali 4y ago

I’m not getting the problem Anthony is trying to solve. I get that people are trying to keep him at bay, but what is he trying to do that they don’t want him to do? I get that he’s trying to identify pockets of innovation, but what will he do with those pockets? It sounds like his game plan is to do “cto stuff”. But shouldn’t there be a more precise goal? Like picking some business metric and cause it to move in the right direction? Or define a new metric? Or introduce a fundamental new way for the company to do business? Once you know the specific problem you want to solve in the company, it becomes a lot easier to pick a strategy. But maybe I’m just misunderstanding what the cto of a 30k person company does.

rubin55 4y ago

Ha what a cool article. This reminded me so much of Hewlett and Packard's management style. I think they called it "Management by Walking Around".

maerF0x0 4y ago

> the individuals others in the company point to who single-handedly fought the system and got a new product, project or service delivered There is a toxicity lurking here. We should also be looking for the individuals who brought positive innovations, fought the system, and failed to overcome it. Why failed? Because it's not their fault that the system is broken, we cannot burden innovators with both the fixing of the environment, plus innovation. Else their only innovation may be how to cope with an increasingly terrible organization, and if that org wants survive or evolve it needs the innovators to stay.