Stats for nerds
3recommend
8mentions
4people
2012–2026years
63% recommend38% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Bizarrely, I found the book Corps Business, by Freedman, to be useful. It's about how the US Marine Corps thinks about leadership. No, he doesn't tell you to shout at people. But he does show how they lead in more difficult circumstances than most of us will ever encounter, and how they help people from wildly different backgrounds work together.
Speaking of learning from people with completely different perspectives, if you want to learn about public speaking, read Do You Talk Funny?, by Nihill. The thesis is that good standup comedians are the best public speakers, and that we can learn their techniques. Much of what they do well has nothing to do with being funny.
- If I remember right Corps Business talks about this https://www.amazon.com/Corps-Business-Management-Principles-...
...otherwise - being a bit of a history nerd - I’ve run into the idea many times in discussion of how military units have evolved over time. Much of the thinking about ideal squad sizes began in WW2 - don’t have single thing I can point you at though
- A great read "Corps Business: The 30 Management Principles of the U.S. Marines" ( https://www.amazon.com/Corps-Business-Management-Principles-... ) and where it talks about communicating the "End State" of a mission instead of the steps required to reach that state. This encourages decentralised decision making, so that those "on the ground" - those actually building a product - are able to take the best decisions given the circumstances they encourage.
To me this is why OKRs work more effectively (so long as you take the metrics with a pinch of salt) than traditional roadmaps. You're focused on achieving a business state rather than chasing a set of arbitrary deadlines for "Feature X". Smart people suddenly have space to use their brains.
In fact typical product roadmaps end up a source of toxicity in most organisations I've worked in...
- Out-of-date the moment they are published.
- Tying down product managers with moving little boxes around PowerPoint; people who'd be better off getting out of the building and talking to customers or working with engineers
- Causing a blame culture around missed deadlines, sapping everyone's morale
- Needing multiple versions depending on the audience; low granularity for top level management, high granularity for engineers, carefully worded for customers and users e.g. "Add ad tracker" or "Fix bug causing data loss" may not be what you want sales people to present
- Always subject to (mis)interpretation
- Based on wild estimates of how long things will take 3 quarters ahead through the year
- Too focused on shiny deliverables and ignoring things like "We need to have to this quarter for re-writing a major component that blocks everything else"
- Often unread or poorly reviewed
- Bad at visualising dependencies between things being worked on
- A source of silliness like "Why are wasting time doing X when we know we need to be doing Y?" ... "Because it's on the roadmap"
... and probably loads more.
- Two books well worth reading in this context are;
- Getting More by Stuart Diamond - https://www.amazon.com/Getting-More-Negotiate-Succeed-Work/d... . On the cover it’s about negotiation but most of what a leader does involves negotiation. Rather than try to convince you, I’ll just say Google engages Stuart Diamond to trail engineers in negotiation. There’s a talk by him here at Google that might convince - https://youtu.be/2QtZ-vObJrk
- The other is “Corps Business” - https://www.amazon.com/Corps-Business-Management-Principles-... - about how the US Marines do management. The big thing you can get some this book is expressing projects and tasks in terms of the _end goal_ instead of the steps required to get there. Make sure teams collectively understand the end goal and let them figure out how to get there is the basic message. That implies you need to put your effort in being good at story telling and presentation
- There's a book on how the marines does management called Corps Business [1], it makes a pretty decent argument for implementing some stuff from the armed forces, eg. adaption, steering by objective, breeding culture etc. It was a while since I read it, but I remember that I thought it was a decent book sans some needless glorification of the marine corps.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Corps-Business-Management-Principles-M...
- The author uses the military as an example of top down and that is true in many cases.
However, after reading the book Corps Business [0] about the United States Marine Corps, you realize that they are VERY big into having a top level mission but almost all of the decision making is pushed down to the lowest levels. In fact, if they do move decision making up the chain, it's usually for non-combat reason e.g. organizing the mess halls is moved up, how should we take that hill is moved "down" and closer to the front line troops.
Several of the other threads have mentioned "but how do we become those orgs??" and my best answer is just to read the book.
NOTE: the book was written in the late 1990s so there are some parts that are dated but the overall concepts are still sound.
0 - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000W94FFU?lv=shuf&channelId=500&r...
