[HN Gopher] Action Plan for a New CTO ___________________________________________________________________ Action Plan for a New CTO Author : sblank Score : 165 points Date : 2022-06-20 15:51 UTC (7 hours ago) (HTM) web link (steveblank.com) (TXT) w3m dump (steveblank.com) | sgt101 wrote: | 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. | pavlov wrote: | On this topic I'm finding Steve Sinofsky's "Hardcore Software" | blog/newsletter very interesting lately: | | 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. | thinkingkong wrote: | 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 wrote: | "Happy families are all the same, unhappy families are each | disfunctional in their own way" or something like that by | Dostoevsky. | Witoso wrote: | ,,Anna Karenina" - Leo Tolstoy | kweinber wrote: | 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 wrote: | Or health issues, or unemployment or death in the family or | divorce. | | You didn't give examples of variety of interesting reasons. | ignoramous wrote: | > _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 (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_c... | (2007) and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20642423 (2019) | lifeisstillgood wrote: | 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. | ineptech wrote: | I am dubious. The whole point of having leaders is that they're | supposed to talk to each other and coordinate the different | needs of the different teams. Which is more important to | accomplish by EOY, to adopt k8s or to ship the new feature? | There is an objectively correct answer to that, and ideally the | leaders should be able to talk to each other and agree on what | it is and plan accordingly. | | What kind of bottom-up "democratic" process would accomplish | that, when the Sales people don't know what k8s is or why it's | useful, and the Devs don't talk to customers about what | features they most urgently want? | powerslacker wrote: | You are right to be dubious. | lifeisstillgood wrote: | Organisational forms matter - look at Ford | | what if there is a org form (democracy) that is 5x or 10x | faster better more flexible than the hierarchical one we are | all living in? I mean we all work in modern companies. no one | can believe this is the best that can be. But where are the | experiments and new forms being tried out. And no, DAOs | barely count. | bjornsing wrote: | > The solution to Kings and Tyranny is not highly trained Kings | with great people skills. | | This is a wonderful quote! Is it yours? | | I think you've captured the problem perfectly, but I'm not sure | democracy is the solution. Democracies don't seems capable of | distributing rewards in any sensible way. I think Plato's | philosopher kings may be the best we can do. | eloff wrote: | 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. | lifeisstillgood wrote: | I think we need to ask what part of the tech-growth S curve | does modern civilisation sit? After coal, oil, electricity, | chemistry, medicine and silicon, is there another big driver | out there? Or are we flattening out and need to find ways to | sustainably share control and wealth and opportunity? | wins32767 wrote: | Why do you think a tech-growth S curve is the right model | for civilization? Companies plateau and then eventually | decline as do cultures and countries. | dvtrn wrote: | _Is there a better way to organize them_ | | Commonly known as a (Tech) union? | blep_ wrote: | 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. | germinalphrase wrote: | What are better models? | andrekandre wrote: | cooperatives: | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumers%27_co-operative | cogman10 wrote: | Employee owned businesses tend to outperform more traditional | top down business models. [1] | | The reason we don't see more of them is because employee | owned businesses have a hard time existing at the startup | phase. That means, you have to transition from a somewhat top | down structure to employee ownership. Guess what C levels | DON'T generally want to do. | | Certainly not to say that democracy would definitely work. | You'd probably need a seniority/trustworthiness modifier on | votes to really be effective (can't have the Junior devs | proposing dumb shit and winning simply because there are more | of them). | | That being said, a lot of opensource projects are run | democratically. That seems to be a good signal for an open | source project's longevity. | | [1] https://www.nceo.org/article/research-employee-ownership | roguecoder wrote: | Democracy is easily captured by moneyed interests, | unfortunately, which within companies gets called "politics". | | I've had much better luck using the techniques of social | anarchy. We all generally want the same thing, we are in | pretty stable communities, and there is a lot that can be | accomplished by facilitators & organizers offering people the | opportunity to opt in to certain kinds of improvements. You | don't need power-over to bring about change. | lifeisstillgood wrote: | Oh I agree - I would suggest that most companies are if not | corrupt then corroded. Weirdly I see Elon and SpaceX as an | example - NASA found itself unable to escape its own | corrosion so intelligently found ways to put its own | engineers (I mean who else did SpaceX hire?) in a new | organisational form. For ten years that managed to avoid | "corrupting" the original vision, probably through sheer | force of Elon firing people who weren't drinking the kool | aid. Which works fine as long as his is the right kool aid. | And something something unions, employees rights, decent | conditions. | | But anyway - getting out of the wrong organisational form | is well hard, and staying out seems ... impossible. | | Perhaps the simplest solution is to make a limit to the | amount of time a company can exist for. Ten years and then | tear it down and return capital to the owners. It might | force rebuilding and recreation into staid forms. | | It's unlikely but there we go - I am just amazed as Inlook | around that we have a mono-culture of organisational forms | globally. | candiddevmike wrote: | Let employees vote to fire their managers, possibly up to the | c-suite (though there may be contention with the board having | this control). Keeps management aligned to the employees | interests. | bjornsing wrote: | > Keeps management aligned to the employees interests. | | Not sure that would work out so well for shareholders... | dgb23 wrote: | The last paragraph is key. It's a long term investment. There | are companies that are run democratically, they typically | grow slowly, but are more stable. | boulos wrote: | 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. | hn_throwaway_99 wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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. | pyrolistical wrote: | What is DS? | Thorondor wrote: | Data scientist, I'd guess. | tomnipotent wrote: | This is an important take away. | | A lot of senior management isn't about specific outcomes, but | building muscle memory within an organization that evolves into | workflows and processes that level up the company. A favorite | quote of mine is "leadership is holding a vision long enough | for someone else to realize it for themselves." | wyager wrote: | 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." | n42 wrote: | 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 | majormajor wrote: | 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 wrote: | Thanks, that is all very coherent. I would like to read your | version of the article :) | jagtesh wrote: | 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. | eatonphil wrote: | Yes I agree. While it was an interesting story, I could not | find a useful takeaway. | eatonphil wrote: | 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 wrote: | > 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 wrote: | > "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. | motbus3 wrote: | 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 | humantorso wrote: | Good read. As someone part of a large of org, some these are spot | on. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-06-20 23:00 UTC)