[HN Gopher] Action Plan for a New CTO
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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.
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(page generated 2022-06-20 23:00 UTC)